pawsplay
Hero
Baen said:Well then what is D&D to you?
A world of medieval chaos, warfare, and poverty. Dragons and ogres lurking in caves. Rogues and delvers in search of treasure. Vampires, robots, aliens, and gods. Magic missile and sleep. Loot. Chainmail armor. Wresting magical weapons from ancient tombs or fearsome villains. Creative ambushes. The perils of darkness, thirst, and starvation. Fighters, clerics, magic-users, and thieves. Elves, dwarves, and halflings. Roadside taverns. Peasants. Pack mules.
And a lot of that is in 4e, too, but the exact mix that is most appealing varies from person to person. To me, it is very important that weaponry bear some basic resemblance to high medieval arms and armor. It is also central to my D&D experience that PCs are decidedly mortal. Magic is present, but not omnipresent, and decidedly limited. I've also grown accustomed to commonalities in the D&D mythology; red and gold dragons, frost giants, carrion crawlers, owl bears, and so forth.
To me, 4e marks
- A transition from simulation and improvisation toward playability and predictability
- A movement away from medieval verisimillitude toward the towns in Final Fantasy
- Movement away from the Tolkien/Moorcock/Leiber/Vance mishmash and toward Action Figure Land, Magic: The Gathering, or whatever you want to call it. Away from fantastic themes and toward a generic aesthetic.
- Away from deadliness and toward zowie, 90s style action RPGs.
- Away from a modular fantasy world and toward set design.
- Away from options that have slowly evolved over several editions and a retreat into zealous niche protection.
- Away from coherent game design and toward publication deadlines.
- Away from an imagined world and toward a resolution-oriented game design.
Where it succeeds, to me 4e seems like kiddie stuff, genre wise. And where it fails, to me, seem like design mistakes plenty of people could point out and correct. While some praise 4e's emphasis on tactics, to me it seems like 4e has pared away general options and areas for for improvisation and given us menus of powers. I once imagined what would happen if you used something like DDM or Star Wars minis as an RPG and simply impoved anything that wasn't combat; 4e almost reminds me of that.
I don't want "powers." I want a battered longsword, a spellbook, and a skittish mule. Call me a grognard or nostalgic or what have you. I stopped playing D&D around 1987 and didn't start up again until 2000, apart from some pickup games here and there. I've played Talislanta and Rolemaster and Runequest and Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing and Palladium and MERP and even Swordbearer. It's not that I'm not open to new things. I'm simply very picky up game designs. I can judge a game based on A), it's design merits, and B) it's appeal to me personally. I have plenty of nits to pick on both counts with 4e.
I have complete respect for the 4e design team, and obviously they know their stuff, but if they were trapped in an elevator with me for an hour you can bet I would have a few things to say about these designs.
I don't want to be told Ranger is just "a build." I don't accept that fantasy superheroics means it's therefore permissible for rogues to jump over people's heads and stab them in the back. I balk at "encounter" based recharges, a concept I have opposed for more than a decade now except for actual story-based game designs.
I've played GURPS and Hero and Silver Age Sentinels and four editions of Gamma World, and I know what's out there.
When I look at what's happened to 4e, I just reject it. It's not bitterness or naievete or resistance to change. It's a perspective I've gained through experience, breadth, creativity, and reading. It's not that I can't imagine anything outside 3.5, it's that I can imagine so much other than 4e. 3e was what brought me back into the fold. Despite its weaknesses, it's a good design, and it fundamentally feels like D&D to me without me putting too much work into it.
Just to run my most recent D&D campaign in 4e, I would have to tear it down to its chassis and rebuild its engine. Through grand coincidence, nearly every change to a race or monster I've heard about what require a retcon in my game. PCs have a "fifteen minute work day" because that's how people realistically work in the field when they have limited flight time or what have you. And sometimes they get pushed back to the trenches and have to resort to backup weapons and crossbows and flasks of fire and occasionally running. Virtually every single-classed character would turn into a multiclassed character in 4e, despite 4e's basic assumption that people will single-class. The 4e team was not kidding when they said you would want to start a new campaign.
But the current campaign will end soon. That's the nature of it. I'm thinking about my next campaign. Will 4e help me run the games I want to run? Will I be able to get the performance out of the game engine I want? Do the paradigms that shape my campaign style work in 4e?
Star Wars Saga is already a tough pill to me, because of the per-encounter Force powers. Because I know, in truth, powers don't work that way, they are being simulated that way for meta-game reasons. It bothers me. It bothers me knowing that other games have vitality points, or simply make powers difficult to use effortlessly. Or that I have half-written notes for a Star Wars conversion for Hero Fifth Edition. Or that it takes minimal conversion to run Star Wars in GURPS, although I'm still not sure if that's a good idea.
I don't want mind-boggling detail, and in fact I reject unnecessary attention to minutiae as a distraction from the game itself. Simulation naturally takes an intuitive sense. And story is something that requires a lot of interpretation, because RPGs do not have plots.
When I need to make an on-the-fly ruling, it does not help me to know what "powers" someone has. They are as specific and unhelpful as non-powered, generic combat options and skill checks. To build action and stories, I need tools that are versatile and that give me a satisfying underpinning of virtual reality.
To me, it is helpful to know how many wounds an orc minion can really take in case it comes up as something more than an exercising in dramatic mook slaughter. If I know how much damage an orc minion does to another orc minion, I can use that orc minion to do anything that makes sense. To me, that is the underpinning of all RPGs, the freedom to do anything that can be conceived. And 4e apparently doesn't feel it's important to know how tough, REALLY, an orc minion it is. That's a big disconnect from my values.