Mike Mearls comments on design

[Fifth Element]

Ultimately, what D&D "is" is entirely subjective and varies from group to group and person to person. that said, though, I think it is an entirely acceptable opinion that it "won't be D&D anymore" if 4E -- and no one can know this yet, but we can make as educated guesses as WotC allows us given they are the ones educating us -- doesn't allow a person or group to continue playing in their hombrew world or in their preferred playstyle without massive amounts of effort.

So if your preferred setting was Dark Sun, then 3E was no longer D&D? Massive amounts of effort were needed to play 3E in Dark Sun, since it was not converted.

And as to the changes to FR - what if they had made these massive changes to the setting, without there being a new edition of the rules? What if they simply decided a major upheaval was necessary? Would this have made the game stop being D&D?

Edit: Of course, the answer to that second one is if you don't like the changes, you ignore them. Just like now.

 

[Fifth Element]

Traditionally, a duel with pistols at dawn, but I think you're too far away for a glove slap to get proceedings underway. And too far away for roh sham bo, tiddlywinks, mud wrestling or rock-paper-scissors...hmmm...

You have me at a disadvantage, sir, as your location is not given below your username.

My pistol is large enough to reach anywhere is the world, if that helps.

 

[Rechan]

THis would be the point at which someone would tell you to play another game -- pretty much what happens to people that say they don't want Dragonborn or whatever in the core. It's a reasonable suggestion in either case, of course, but it totally ignores the fact that we like D&D and we want to play D&D.

And yet:

When I'm the DM:
1) Allow Elves and Dwarves in my campaigns because other people like them,
2) Remove them and put something in there that takes the place.

When I play:
3) Say nothing, play them.

See? I don't expect WotC to throw them out because I'm bored with them. I don't get upset when I see "Elf PrC in Book X" or "Elf in Module Y". I either use it (option 1,3), or I reflavor it to suit my needs (option 2). And I don't think less of people for liking them. (This doesn't stop me for disliking people who are obnoxious when playing them.)

Here's the thing about the changes in flavour that 4E is presenting: at this point, they seem so pervasive, so random and so extreme that it suggests that 4E will in fact not support playing D&D in the manner that [any given person] has been playing for 30 years.

That just blows my mind. I don't see, at all, how anyone could say that and be serious.

 

[Tquirky]

Hrm, you might have some issues anyway then, because WotC is now pushing the PHB2+ as "core" too. So you may well be seeing psionic warforged NPCs a couple years down the road...

Yes, good start, but I think it needs more "wahoo" factor. Can we arm it with a sentient dancing spiked chain, have it riding a diplodicus, and have it be a paragon ninja/pirate/warlord?

Getting there. Still not 4E enough, though - needs more trademarkable IP. Okay, riding a forestravager, then, and wielding a spikevorpaliser.

Kewl.

 

[I'm A Banana]

A bit of everything - including, for instance - Golden Wyvern Adepts?

I think the main issue with this, at least now, is that no one can imagine what a Golden Wyvern Adept *is*, other than a feat name. No one has been clamoring to include one in their games. No one wanted this, yet we're getting it (at the expense of things we want, such as druids or polymorph!)

People want to be Conan or the Grey Mouser or Achilles or Inu Yasha or Ash from Pokemon.

No one has ever in the history of fantasy ever wanted to be a Golden Wyvern Adept.

4e meets a lot of resistance with it's new flavor because it's largely meaningless.

Once we know what a Golden Wyvern Adept is, maybe it will make perfect sense and everyone will want to be one. As it is, it lacks everything Disney and Squaresoft and the human history of imagination has desired.

Here, I'm feeling punchy, so I even illustrated the Grand Plan... You could probably replace Golden Wyvern Adept with almost ANY of the core setting's flavor and have just about the same reaction.

 

[Reynard]

That just blows my mind. I don't see, at all, how anyone could say that and be serious.

Seriously? I mean, no snark intended,: you can't click on the collection of proposed 4E changes and see why some people look at that list and say, "Oh my god, they have completely changed the game."?

Because if you honestly can't, if you honesty shrug and say "meh" to the apparent changes to both fluff and crunch, the slaughtering of sacred cows and the alienation of the existing fanbase, I can only surmise that you aren't particularly invested in D&D as it is written. That's not a dig, just an observation.

But, the thing is, many people play D&D "out of the box" with thier own bits and pieces, rules and fluff, sprinkled on top and mixed in a little. Most people don't craft whole fantasy universes -- they create some maps and some cities and some NPCs and anything they don't outright create, they call "per core". While these elements might not be mytho-historical archetypes like Tquirky has suggested, they are D&D archetypes and, as archetypes, they provide "picture is worth a thousand words" level of detail in a world that would otherwise be a few pages in a notebook.

If you change the definition of the Dryad, for example, then you change the corner of the world of the homebrew where the dryad(s) dwell(s). Start stacking up those changes and suddenly 4E doesn't look like D&D because your world doesn't look like it did.

I hope that helps you understand what I mean.

As to Dark Sun (and this goes for Spelljammer and Planescape and Ravenloft, too): total strawman. those worlds were created specifically to show that D&D was more than "vanilla fantasy" and not only did they require a lot of work and fiddling (which happens to show off D&D's versatility, but that's neither here nor there), the reason that 3E was still D&D was because legions of dedicated fans could do roughly equivalent work to recreate them for the new D&D. That isn't the same thing as being able to crack the book and carry on, but you couldn't have done that with those settings in any edition, either; you couldn't just crack open the AD&D2 books and play Dark Sun with the AD&D2 Dark Sun campaign setting, so why would you expect it to be any different with 3E. But you could crack open the 1E, 2E or 3E books and play Greyhawk, FR or even Krynn without much more than a list of place names and "monsters that don't exist here".

 

[belgarath97]

The complaint is that DMs who want to flesh out every corner of their world don't want to include it, and thus feel forced because it's shackled to the mechanics. Maybe there is no gold or no wyverns or no adepts or no this or that, but because it's right there in the mechanics, well they just have to put it in.

At least to my understanding.

Yeah but they don't. There isn't a single thing in any edition of D&D that you have to include. If I wanted I could rewrite the whole damn thing. But in general I don't want to.

To anyone still hung up on this naming convention, I really have only this to say:

"Really? I mean REALLY? This is it, huh? All the new and interesting things we're learning, and you're getting hung up on 'Gonden Wyvern Adpept'? REALLY?"

 

[PeterWeller]

But if you have been playing even 3.5 by the core in Greyhawk or FR or Krynn, 4E looks hella different and not in a good way.

I have, and it doesn't.

 

[Rechan]

Seriously? I mean, no snark intended,: you can't click on the collection of proposed 4E changes and see why some people look at that list and say, "Oh my god, they have completely changed the game."?

Yes, I'm completely serious.

Because if you honestly can't, if you honesty shrug and say "meh" to the apparent changes to both fluff and crunch, the slaughtering of sacred cows and the alienation of the existing fanbase, I can only surmise that you aren't particularly invested in D&D as it is written. That's not a dig, just an observation.

I'm confused what you're saying.

Are you saying that I'm not in love with the Fluff as Written? No, no I'm not, simply because I think it's too limiting, stagnant, dull, and that the slaughter of the sacred cows is great because it's allowing the game to Grow and experiment.

If you change the definition of the Dryad, for example, then you change the corner of the world of the homebrew where the dryad(s) dwell(s). Start stacking up those changes and suddenly 4E doesn't look like D&D because your world doesn't look like it did.

I don't see the change with the dryad forcing that change - the change appears to be expansion, meaning "The dryad can also do this, and this, and it's also this".

As it was said above, Darksun takes a lot of tap dancing to make function in 3e because it didn't get converted. Does that mean that 3e is no longer D&D because it negated the campaign?

It seems like just a whole lot of upset over Nostalgia. That it feels different but the change in the rules doesn't change anything. It doesn't change the memories, it doesn't change you from being able to do what you did before. It just means that Elves aren't their own class, they are just a race and you can Take classes.

But you could crack open the 1E, 2E or 3E books and play Greyhawk, FR or even Krynn without much more than a list of place names and "monsters that don't exist here".

Because those settings are generic enough to fit it no matter what the core was, and I've yet to see anything in the core that makes it even inconvenient to do with 4e.

 

[The Little Raven]

Seriously? I mean, no snark intended,: you can't click on the collection of proposed 4E changes and see why some people look at that list and say, "Oh my god, they have completely changed the game."?

No more than I can see why people looked at 3e and said the same thing. It appears as untrue to me now as it did back in 1999.