Kinak
First Post
Got that for you.I agree with everything said here. Just an excellent summary all the way around. Can someone cover the posrep for me?
Cheers!
Kinak
Got that for you.I agree with everything said here. Just an excellent summary all the way around. Can someone cover the posrep for me?
Wow, yeah it was Age of Worms that KILLED 3e for us as a group, for a lot of the reasons you listed. I have been playing some Pathfinder as of late, although I find their rules a mess too.
Which is evidence that the APs are the main reason that Paizo is successful. Despite 3e's rules, (which admittedly others find great) Paizo has been quite successful. It also explains why people are perfectly willing to buy books that only slightly different from the ones they bought under the 3e era.
Which also suggests that if 5e produces high qualitly and fun adventures and real good adventure support products (ie. tokens/minis and battlemaps to support the adventures) people will buy in to 5e despite what they say in "dealbreaker" threads.
I assume that many Paizo subscribers read but never play their AP modules. Which makes comments about "flavour" very interesting - because (unless I've badly misunderstood you) you're talking about how it reads, not how it plays - ie the adventure as a work of fiction rather than as something to be played.
To be honest I don't think the reaction was so bad. It got the Penny Arcade guys into 4e, particularly Mike Kruhulik, who previously had no experience with or interest in tabletop RPGs. Wil Wheaton liked it and used it for the campaign he ran for his sons. The Amazon reviews are quite positive. 20 five-star reviews, 25 four-star reviews, 20 three-star reviews, 8 two-star reviews, and 8 one-star reviews. The negative reviews either decry the physical product (flimsy) or desire more story or plot. A lot of the 5-star reviews strike me as unbridled enthusiasm ("We just got this can had one battle! Awesome! 5 stars!"), but the four star reviews largely echo my assessment earlier: solid, if uninspired.
It seems to me that a lot of the negative reaction to KotS falls into two types, which one can see on the Amazon reviews. 3e players who use it to whip 4e. I.e., "4e is all about combat. Look at KotS: you just move from one combat to another."
And then 4e players who note that it has little in the way of story or narrative weight to its encounters -- it's just a largely linear string of battles until you get to the boss. In a sense, if you're sensitive to the "4e is just aping MMOs," then KotS is a poor module because it plays into that stereotype, without playing to the wholly non-MMO-like strengths of 4e.
However, it should be noted that such video-game like structure is in fact a legacy from traditional D&D itself. Many a player enjoyed TSR-D&D and 3e doing exactly that: have a decent background story for the setting and reason for adventuring, then have the PCs go door-to-door kicking evil butt.
(As an aside, I think there are two flaws in KotS from a traditional dungeoncrawl point of view. One is that there are many Encounters in which battle to the death is the assumed outcome.
Shawn, I loved that Halls of Undermountain adventure. It was in my mind, one pinnacle of the 4E era. It got some bad reviews on Amazon, simply because monster stats were not included! that's a lame reason. I guess people were looking for the Delve format.
I loved the adventure! I wrote one of the glowing reviews of it.
It would work perfectly in D&D Next. Any chance of a conversion???
You can literally run dozens of groups through this module and every one of them will have a fresh and unique experience.
I agree completely that having a plethora of great adventures is absolutely key to the success of Next. But, I'd actually argue the best shot at achieving this is for WotC to not focus on adventure-making but to once again facilitate third-party entry into that part of the industry. 3e's emphasis on this was really helpful to growing the game, and the argument made by then-WotC execs like Ryan Dancey that a thriving third-party adventure market drives sales of the core books (and thereby raises WotC's profit) was exactly the kind of forward thinking that's needed today.When you get down to it, there's one thing that I really, really hope that Wizards do and do well with D&D Next, and it has nothing to do with the system.
It is supporting the game with great adventures. Lots of them, and a lot of them available in printed form. Not, "here are the first nine, and then we'll forget about them", no, an ongoing stream of them.
Done before you posted!I agree with everything said here. Just an excellent summary all the way around. Can someone cover the posrep for me?
I think the biggest difference this might have from the OGL would be that you might be more likely to want legal advice to work out whether what you were doing was compliant with the (more limited) terms of the licence.I do believe that this is where the licensing for 5e would shine. Maybe limit the new OGL (whatever it's called) to module support instead of throwing the doors open. To me, this would create a pretty healthy feedback loop where people are buying modules from Company X, but are still going to be playing WOTC D&D.
Not sure how it works, since how do you define "module", but, IANAL. Smarter people than me can figure that out.
I think Robin Laws does a good job of showing how this sort of thing can be done - write an adventure which admits of multiple approaches to resolving the encounters in it, and open-ended rather than rail-roaded in its resolution.The feeling was that because so much time and effort went into detailing each bit of the game (in D&D, each encounter, in the FPS, each cutscene), and because you wanted the player to get the best possible bang for his buck, you wanted to ensure he saw as much of the material as possible. And, in both cases, the best way to do that is a railroad - force them down a path taking in everything, and they're sure to see everything!
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Ideally, I would like publishers to at least consider four distinct approaches to each encounter: fight, evade (by sneaking past, or similar), corrupt (that is, negotiate passage, or even ally with the NPCs), and deceive (the old classic of wearing Stormtrooper armour, or similar). Obviously, I understand that space considerations means they won't be able to do everything every time, and of course even those don't cover every approach anyway, but it really would be good to at least see some different approaches considered.
Sounds plausible.Many a player enjoyed TSR-D&D and 3e doing exactly that: have a decent background story for the setting and reason for adventuring, then have the PCs go door-to-door kicking evil butt. And 4e, at least initially, goes well with that playstyle thanks to its detailed combat engine and harder-to-kill characters.
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IMO there are a lot of players who played the game that way and enjoyed it, and enjoyed KotS. I also suspect that many such 4e players also tend to be more accepting of 5e, because while it doesn't look much like 4e mechanically, it provides them the same kind of play they enjoyed in 4e. But I admit that this last part is me extrapolating from my own experience.