D&D 4E Palladium's philosophy for D&D 4e? Pros and cons

[Hussar]

Heh, T Foster, I think you've pretty much perfectly explained why AD&D was created.

 

[Corinth]

That thread confirmed what I long suspected about Siembieda: he has no idea what the difference between "game master" and "game designer" is, and that lack of fundamental understanding explains why the man can't produce a proper product to save his life.

 

[Melan]

That thread confirmed what I long suspected about Siembieda: he has no idea what the difference between "game master" and "game designer" is, and that lack of fundamental understanding explains why the man can't produce a proper product to save his life.

Or he just has a different idea about the same.

 

[Plane Sailing]

If I see one more 4E thread, I'm going to probably bludgeon the first person I personally meet who even puts the two symbols together in his speech...seriously, give the 4E talk a rest. You're just going to make it arrive that much quicker and make it that much more painful for all of us

Razz, that is why we have the '4e' thread label available - so that people who are not interested and would rather not see anything connected with 4e can easily tell which threads to avoid.

If you dislike 4e threads, I wonder why you are reading this one?!?

Cheers

 

[Kae'Yoss]

What a dreadful though.
I want my rules to be clear, spelled out, unambiguous. I can always ignore what is written and do whatever I like, if I want. But I want to be able to play if I don't want to think up rules myself. If a ruleset can't provide that, why bother with it? Why give anyone money to get a half-baked product?

 

[Stalker0]

What a dreadful though.
I want my rules to be clear, spelled out, unambiguous. I can always ignore what is written and do whatever I like, if I want. But I want to be able to play if I don't want to think up rules myself. If a ruleset can't provide that, why bother with it? Why give anyone money to get a half-baked product?

Completely agree. On these forums, I'll debate the rules to death. But in my own game, I do what I want. If there's a rule I don't like, its out the window.

DMs need to wake up and remember its their game. The whole idea of player power in 3x is nonsense. If you change a rule and a player asks you why, the answer is literally "because I said so."

Now, there's nothing wrong with being rational and upfront with players, and there's certainly the matter of consistency (changing rules in the middle of a campaign can be a problem). But if start a new game with a new sets of rules, then if you don't like it, run your own game!!

I think the nostalgia people have over older gaming is just that...nostalgia. Its back in the glory days when everyone had endless time to game, you didn't worry about jobs and money and wives, you just sat back and let it ride. I'm starting to go through that a bit myself, having just left college and realizing how much harder gaming in the "real world" is. But that doesn't mean the system has gotten worse, nor does it mean a more freeform system is better.

 

[Donovan Morningfire]

Ye gods I hope the next (eventual but hopefully not appearing anytime soon) edition of D&D doesn't go the way of Palladium. I like having a nice consistent set of rules as a common framework, one that can be tweaked if needed, but provides a solid foundation for how the game is run.

Palladium has very little of that, if any. As was said in another thread, Palladium was an "improvement" on the D&D ruleset of the day. However, I personally see v3.X of D&D as a far better improvement on the basics of D&D, taking into account lessons learned over the years, something Siembieda hasn't done and from the sounds of it won't ever do, becuase he's convinced that he's absolutely right and nobody else has a clue. If anything, I'd say WotC has one-up'd him in the realm of "generic tool-kit" by means of d20 Modern, which can easily be changed to any type of setting (admittedly some work better than others) and has a consistent rule-set. Wouldn't be too surprised to learn that a lot of the RIFTS d20 fan supplements use d20 Modern as a baseline, with the OCC/RCCs being Advanced Classes or just separate races.

Personally I hope that someone else snags the license for a Robotech RPG, becuase while I'd like to play in that setting, I don't want to have to learn somebody else's house rules to do it.

 

[Contrarian]

Basically it's all house rules, there is little or no 'one true way' or core system, just a home brew Kevin managed to publish and has been slightly tweaking on and off for 25 years now. Some of the tweaks he puts in the books, some he doesn't

Well, that's just stupid. He keeps publishing a game he knows can't be played as written. Seriously, that's just stupid. That's why he only has fanatics playing his game. Unplayable rules lose casual players.

 

[pawsplay]

Bwa ha ha ha ha! Dude, that's like worrying the RC cola will buy Coke.

Or that TSR will get bought by a trading card game publisher?

 

[wingsandsword]

Or that TSR will get bought by a trading card game publisher?

Not really.

WotC was a huge company with a smash-hit product that created a whole new field of the gaming industry (and it was more than a card game company, they had made RPG's long before M:tG, but Magic was their most famous and successful product). At the same time TSR was widely rumored throughout the industry to be dying, and was known to have trouble getting books printed and operating and was driving fans away through hardline overconservative IP policies.

Now, WotC/Hasbro is the titan of the field with a product that has massive market share, and Palladium is now an also-ran that was big a decade or more ago but has been slowly fading and is alienating its fans through hardline overconservative IP policies.