Opinions on "Does Format Matter"

[Dungeoneer]

I think the guy who wrote the article is on to something (although I think the poll misses the point - it's about people's perceptions of the stat blocks, not how useful they are or aren't). I have a saying: "Presentation counts." I generally use this in the context of the IT field which I work in, but it applies pretty well to life in general. Humans respond very viscerally to the look and feel of something. They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but the fact is that everybody does. We just can't help it.

I would guess that if 4e had been given a more 'classic' look at the get-go and perhaps started with more 'Essentialized' classes that it would have been more widely accepted by the community, at least at first.

That said, I think that at this point most of the people who were initially turned off by the 'look and feel' of 4e have probably given it a fair shake. In the long run I don't know that what the game looked like will matter much. But in the short run it probably did quite a bit.

...

On a side note, people are constantly knocking the 4e artists, and I don't think that's quite fair. Artists on this kind of thing aren't free to just draw any old way they like. There is such a thing as 'art direction', and the 4e artists have to follow theirs. You could have Michelangelo working at WotC, but if he wanted to keep his job he'd better match the guidelines handed down by management.

The art direction in 4e is obviously intended to attract young readers without seeming too 'kiddie' for adults*. Does it succeed? Meh. Sometimes.

The artwork in 4e isn't always my cup of tea, but the blame needs to be laid at the feet of the art direction, not the individual artists. I'm sure WotC can afford the best, and gets them. It's just too bad they then shackle them with these oddly shaped, vaguely cartoonish characters.

* I'm just happy they didn't go with an anime look.

 

[wedgeski]

A lot of the art in 4E is fabulous, some of it not. Obviously the same can be said about any of the prior editions. If there's one thing I prefered about 3E in this respect though, it's that the art was better-integrated with the text; often in 4E source-books, the art is just a square piece copy-pasted onto the corner of the page, with very little effort having gone into the layout.

I can't see presentation as having been a deciding factor for any but an extreme few, but I do think overall the art direction for 4E strayed too far from what had gone before (despite the in-game benefits).

 

[TerraDave]

...That should be first. Before there, there's a section on how to read powers, and the chapters are laid out in order of the steps of character creation, leaving the fiddly rules stuff that you don't actually require on a moment-to-moment basis in the back.

...Dear RPG designers: It is good design for your core book to include examples of play.

The Heroes of books come close to this format, and do seem very newby friendly.

3E fans are of course a totally different issue (even if the substance of the essentials book makes concessions to them).

But 4E always faced this dilema: change to little, and people are up in arms over 3.75, change to much, and they say "hey, this isn't the same game!".

WotC probably made more changes then needed...and have dialed some of those back in the essentials products...but the dilema was and is always there.