D&D 4E My First 4E Game: Disappointing. Yours? (UPDATED with player feedback)

[The_Gneech]

<Wakko> G'nite everybody! </Wakko>

-The Gneech

 

[Charwoman Gene]

You see huge-breasted panda bears with twenty foot glowing purple penises in normal life?

I've been going to too many cons that don't ban furries.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Excuse me while I clean off my monitor from spitting out my water. Thanks for a good Friday afternoon laugh.

If we see these show up in the 4e MM then I promise I will never again argue with anybody that says D&D is turning into a MMORPG.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

I do not think this means what you think it means.

Amen.

(I like "Amen" better than "This". It's not a religious thing.)

 

[Xorn]

I think the point was that if some people in your group don't want to play 4E and instead want to play something else, then perhaps you should try to accommodate what they want sometimes. Perhaps you could let them run what they want on alternating weeks, or every third week, etc.

In our gaming group, we used to rotate between DMs/Campaigns. Sure, we'd play my long running Planescape game most of the time, but sometimes we would play a Rifts game or a Night Below game run by another GM other weeks. These games were all held at my place even when I wasn't running the game. Even though I personally do not care for Rifts, I was more than willing to play because one of the players was really excited about it. There's a give and take in most long lived gaming groups.

So Cloverfield represents someone in your gaming group who wants to run/play something other than 4E from time to time. It could be Rifts, 3.x, Pathfinder, d20 Traveller, original Traveller, d6 Star Wars, CoC or maybe even the Cloverfield RPG (assuming there was such a beast).

I stuck the on there because I was just poking fun at the suggestion that someone wants to see Cloverfield over 300. Anyway...

You're absolutely right--if Josh doesn't want to play 4E, if he wants to run a 3.5 game, great. That's not the analogy I made. My game is 4E--I'm going to run 4E. If you don't want to play 4E, then my game is not going to be for you. If you run 3.5, I'll play because I'm your buddy, and I don't mind playing nearly as much as running it.

But I'm not being inflexible, or antagonistic when I say, "I'm going to start running 4E guys, if you don't want to play 4E my game isn't going to be fun to you."

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Hmmh, I am still worrying, that my normal life has certain similarities with second life... Am I living in a MMO?

You might be! In this world, the rules are the physics of the game world. And let's face it, the rules suck.

We worry about 1-1-1 or 1-2-1 diagonals? The real world has the number Pi, which is not just simply a reasonable "3", but an irrational number starting with 3.142 plus an infinite number of decimals! This world has entropy, meaning that effectively, we lose energy into non-reusable forms, which means we're doomed!
Hell, to create a character in this Universe, you basically have to wait 4 Billion of years until life has evolved enough to create it! Even preperations for a 3E Level 30 epic level game are not so bad.

And heck, we don't even have the full rules set - and some even believe we might never have it.
Different rules for PCs and NPCs are your problem? Until a few decades ago, we had two big theories explaining parts of the universe which just wouldn't mesh. And now we have some rules that we don't even know if they work! And there are even some people that think we might never have "one ruleset" to rule everything, and instead build the "physics of the world" out of multiple maps, so we might have one set of rules for metallurgy and another set of rules for nuclear decay!

Well, at least the so called "real world" has sweet-ass graphics.

 

[CleverNickName]

Like I said before, we noticed a lot of WoW-iness in 4E. This was probably because the players wanted it to be "just like WoW," for whatever reason. Maybe they were mocking th new rules and character abilities of 4E, or maybe they were trying to figure it out in terms of something they were already familiar with. It was hard to tell what their intent was, because I was too busy letting myself get pissed off about it.

The bottom line is, the WoW influence (or videogame influence, or anime influence, or purple panda penis influence) can be argued either way, in varying degrees, but it is only going to be a big deal if you let it be. Unfortunately, I let it become a huge deal, and it ruined the evening for everyone.

 

[Wormwood]

This was probably because the players wanted it to be "just like WoW," for whatever reason. Maybe they were mocking th new rules and character abilities of 4E, or maybe they were trying to figure it out in terms of something they were already familiar with.

Which is precisely what my players did. They were able to quickly grok new 4e concepts by viewing them through the prism of WoW.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

Which is precisely what my players did. They were able to quickly grok new 4e concepts by viewing them through the prism of WoW.

Right. For me, the argument is no longer "Do 4e and WoW have commonalities?" It's obvious there's been some cross-pollination. The real question is, "Does this make DnD better?" I'm in the camp that believes it can, but I won't really know that until the full ruleset is available.

And even then, it's highly subjective. The rules could be consistent and rock solid, but if you don't like the way the game handles resource management, you probably won't want to play.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Amen.

This.