D&D 4E Ron Edwards on D&D 4e

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think a lot of 4e's value is in the way it integrates its cosmic conflicts into the broader game. I have not always used the Nentir Vale with 4e, but I always used the Dawn War.

The best game I ran doubled down on those things. I set it at the height of the Nerath Empire with Bane and Kord as basic stand ins for Romulus and Remus.

Yeah, so, in 1975 or so I scribbled a map onto some sort of big sheet of graph paper I got someplace and that became the 'world map'. Instead of wandering around from commercial D&D setting to other commercial D&D setting, I just plopped different areas onto this map to do different things with, and then kind of invented a few stories to make it all a bit coherent (IE there was an ancient empire, and then a not so ancient empire, and then a big crash, and over in this other area there was a magical catastrophe, etc.). The main conflict generator was something called the 'Elder Gods', which were described as 'elemental beings' (there's a fire guy, an ocean guy, and a nature god who defected to the other side). They claim to have created the 'Younger Gods', but that might be PR... Anyway, the Younger Gods are more like the 4e gods, pretty much just bog standard D&D gods, Gruumsh, Moradin, and Correlon even got in there as sponsors of their respective races, though the others I apparently made up (I forget, it was 40+ years ago).

The upshot being this was a LOT like 4e's layout! I even had a 'land of fairy' where the 'eldar' (high elves back in the day) lived,
and a 'land of death', which in that cosmology was the 'first world' which the Elder Gods built, but then smashed up when they decided to exterminate the Younger Gods. So, the current world is the SECOND world, and the first one is kind of shadowfell-like.

Kinda strange how different people can pretty much invent the same solutions, lol. I didn't really explicitly make an 'elemental chaos' I guess, never really thought too much about it, so I will give WotC credit for polishing the ideas more than I ever bothered to. I still use my god names, so instead of Pelor there is Lir, who is usually depicted as female (since the first person to run a cleric of Lir so decreed, lol).

Oh, and the primary time frame was 'after the big empire crashed' and the world is just a lot of little towns and castles with maybe a few barbarians claiming they run things, when they aren't getting their butts kicked by whatever remnants of orc hordes are still roving around... lol.

 

[Manbearcat]

He’s an Evolutionary Biologist.

When Edwards says “it causes brain damage” it’s a euphemism for a hypothesis like “a peer contagion (or multiples with varying degrees of overlap) within the cultural layer of D&D exacerbates our evolutionary-based cognitive biases and reliance on bad heuristics.”

Which…if you’ve ever seen much of my commentary…well…

 

[cavalier973]

Yeah, so, in 1975 or so I scribbled a map onto some sort of big sheet of graph paper I got someplace and that became the 'world map'. Instead of wandering around from commercial D&D setting to other commercial D&D setting, I just plopped different areas onto this map to do different things with, and then kind of invented a few stories to make it all a bit coherent (IE there was an ancient empire, and then a not so ancient empire, and then a big crash, and over in this other area there was a magical catastrophe, etc.). The main conflict generator was something called the 'Elder Gods', which were described as 'elemental beings' (there's a fire guy, an ocean guy, and a nature god who defected to the other side). They claim to have created the 'Younger Gods', but that might be PR... Anyway, the Younger Gods are more like the 4e gods, pretty much just bog standard D&D gods, Gruumsh, Moradin, and Correlon even got in there as sponsors of their respective races, though the others I apparently made up (I forget, it was 40+ years ago).

The upshot being this was a LOT like 4e's layout! I even had a 'land of fairy' where the 'eldar' (high elves back in the day) lived, and a 'land of death', which in that cosmology was the 'first world' which the Elder Gods built, but then smashed up when they decided to exterminate the Younger Gods. So, the current world is the SECOND world, and the first one is kind of shadowfell-like.

Kinda strange how different people can pretty much invent the same solutions, lol. I didn't really explicitly make an 'elemental chaos' I guess, never really thought too much about it, so I will give WotC credit for polishing the ideas more than I ever bothered to. I still use my god names, so instead of Pelor there is Lir, who is usually depicted as female (since the first person to run a cleric of Lir so decreed, lol).

There is a blog that asserts PoLand/Nentir Vale is as Old School as one can get with a setting. During the article, he says something like, “this setting is already part of your cultural consciousness.”

Here is the post: 4th edition's implied setting is Old School as f*ck

 

[niklinna]

Wait...is that the same Ron Edwards who said that playing D&D causes brain damage?

Go back to the 1st page of this thread if you want to hear a bunch about that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I mean, that's simply not treating skills in a manner that everyone does by default in combat. If something is meant to be challenging, but a PC can consistently uncork skills at a value 5 higher than expected(i.e. about 8 levels higher), the DM has to adjust the skill challenges to match or those skill challenges won't be interesting.

An example might be Athletics. Normally, it might just be a door needed to be broken through, but what if it was two doors, one right after the other. A hard DC gets you through one door, hard+5 gets you through two. Or go after 'weak defenses' — sure, Arcana might solve 500 different problems, but the Wizard is trained in say Insight and not very good at it, and there's an insight check to be made while the skill challenge separates out the PCs for a little bit.

Etc...

Right, but where it really bites you is say you want to use your acrobatics to dodge an attack. That COULD be a defense, literally, if the various bonuses were aligned. HoML2 literally works that way, you say "OK, I dodge that fireball" and you ROLL AN ATHLETICS CHECK as your defense. It all 'just works' because all the bonuses are built onto entirely the same scale. Also I only use up to +3 enhancement, so its not that critical if you do or do not have it, and having redone the math there's not a need for hacks like "inherent bonus" anyway (there's just level bonus, actually as things are currently tweaked it goes up a bit faster than in 4e). This is the sort of thing that COULD HAVE worked, heck, even things like the use of Athletics to escape a grab is all messed up in 4e, and only because of this sort of issue. I think the engine needed one more revision before it was ready to publish. Stuff "just works" in my game, weapons and implements are ONE THING too. Same basic reasons.

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

Gonna be brutally honest: anecdotes about how epic awesome your particular games were don't disprove the anecdotes the people whose games fell flat. Some games "click" for some groups, some games are a big miss. 4e was a miss for my group (I was a player and did not find it engaging). Had the GM been more familiar with GMing and the system as a whole, I have no doubt 4e would have been more fun. But it's still not a game I want to play. I lean hard into simpler systems with simpler mechanics, so even 5e is a bit much for my tastes.

As I alluded to earlier in the thread, I miss 3e and have very strong nostalgia for it. But I recognize that if I were to return to it, the game that I would run as GM would not resemble 3e much at all.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm either confused by what you mean by "like D&D in that space" if it is "no longer the dominant game"? Or are you not taking dominant to be 'far and away the most played'? (Is it no longer the most played of that type?)

I don't know about the sheer volume of people playing, but CoC has not been a game which contributed anything new in the Cosmic Horror genre in a long time. While CoC's latest edition (which I experienced as a player briefly) does seem to be modestly cleaned up in a few respects compared to older editions, it still suffers from basically the same old "started out as RQ core rules, but missed a lot of the good stuff" as it has always had. I think it is not played so much anymore. I think it doesn't command any sort of mind share at all in terms of defining its genre nor what can be done in that genre.

And there's a huge way in which it never was like D&D, that is it borrows its genre, so you can produce entirely different games which are TRULY Mythos games. You can certainly do like Dungeon World and steal some tropes from D&D, but D&D is its own unique thing unto itself, and always will be. Actually I think THAT explains D&D's survival and prominence more than anything else, it is an IP all its own, effectively. CoC is not. Maybe at one time it came close and maybe it could have been, but the system was just too weak.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well its definitely not his opinion of 4e LOL .

SO, you are saying I'm not brain-damaged??!! lol. Or did playing 4e reverse the damage that was done by 2e? What about 1e, did that just create impotency? WWWHHHAAAAAA

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There is a blog that asserts PoLand/Nentir Vale is as Old School as one can get with a setting. During the article, he says something like, “this setting is already part of your cultural consciousness.”

Here is the post: 4th edition's implied setting is Old School as f*ck

Interesting, though when I think of the early settings I think more of huge sprawling things with 1000's and 1000's of locations and super elaborate encounter tables and whatnot (Wilderlands of High Fantasy, City State of the Invincible Overlord). I mean, those two products together are like a dungeon map and key on a huge scale, and the hexcrawl rules are just subbing in for the dungeon exploration rules. lol.

 

[Garthanos]

SO, you are saying I'm not brain-damaged??!! lol. Or did playing 4e reverse the damage that was done by 2e? What about 1e, did that just create impotency? WWWHHHAAAAAA

Maybe 4e repairs with an inspiring word