Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[pemerton]

Well, but leisure reading stands up with play for me; kind of equal values?

I do plenty of leisure reading, but (for me) it's not like reading fiction. So (as I think I might have posted upthread in relation to the 4e Monster Manual) the imaginative pleasure consists in envisaging things in play, not becoming immersed in the rulebook as such.

 

[Parmandur]

I do plenty of leisure reading, but (for me) it's not like reading fiction. So (as I think I might have posted upthread in relation to the 4e Monster Manual) the imaginative pleasure consists in envisaging things in play, not becoming immersed in the rulebook as such.

Yeah, different strokes; I get pleasure from imagining the stuff in in play, too; but, my imagination gets juiced up by the natural language approach, not the dry reference style.

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[Manbearcat]

<snip> We cared more about character than build, by a fair amount; we liked the simple dirty violence of 3.x (we never were high enough level to pull of scry teleport shenanigans), but rocket tag was a feature, not a bug; similarly with LFQW: they are freaking Wizards, man...

Thinking about it, I posit the difference for 3.x vs. 4E on this from may be a difference of degree, rather than kind: the balance of the scales just went a mite too far, with too many things happening: much easier with bag of HP rocket tag.

<snip>Mearls is the great hero of D&D in my book, for giving me the game I want, at only a slightly faster pace than I can keep up with, while telling me that my play style is in fact the norm (in college, I thought my group was weird; not so, according to the surveys...): but I'm biased, I suppose.

Which brings us to the second style of play of pre-WotC D&D: it's a style which uses the mechanical trappings of the first style, but not the other play procedures. In particular, it assumes that the GM is overwhelmingly in charge of deciding what the content is that the players (via their PCs) encounter and hence engage with. The Dragonlance modules are a famous and fairly early published example of this style; the whole Planescape and 2nd ed Ravenloft ouevre is a highwatermark of it in pre-WotC D&D publishing.

In this style, mechanics often become secondary: the players don't use mechanics to gather and act meaningfully upon information (because the sequence of content is in any event under GM control - a hallmark of this style is that there is a clue, but then if the players don't find the clue a NPC tells them anyway); the players don't use mechanics to gain access to the content, but rather it comes to them as the GM dictates; and the one place where it is often assumed that mechanics will be deployed - ie combat - the assumption is that the PCs will win, such that if in fact they lose the whole adventure goes off the rails or grinds to a TPK-induced halt (and there is often an overt or covert signal to the GM that s/he should fudge combat outcomes to make sure this doesn't happen).

[MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] made a good post about this playstyle in a recent thread - summing up, in this second playstyle which downplays mechanics and relies heavily on GM control over the sequence of events in play (what content is introduced, and how the players' interactions with it via their PCs ends up), the players' main job is to provide colour and enthusiastic engagement with the GM's story.

My suspicion is that quite a bit of 5e is played in more-or-less this style.

<snip>

I think this is the true meaning of the slogan that 5e "puts poweer back in the hands of the GM". Or of [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]'s remarks that balance in 5e is on the GM, not the mechanical design.

But failing to do this is not problematic if it is assumed that the GM, in any event, is in charge of managing the outcomes of encounters and feeding from one to the next. <snip>

If we assume that the GM is in charge of managing those outcomes and shepherding the players (via the PCs) through his/her scenario, then the fact that an encounter takes one or three rounds is just another one among myriad factors that the GM is managing, fudging around, etc. For many D&Ders being able to do that sort of thing is what they mean by "being a good GM".

Post of the week, man; your second style really does capture my experience. Good show!

I'll post something with a little more meat when I have a moment (I was thinking about composing a D&D family tree or further breaking down how TotM is fascilitated or hampered by a ruleset). I just want to say though, I truly appreciate your sincerity and candor Parmandur. I'm not being sarcastic. In the above you:

1) Espouse the virtues of Rocket Tag and Bags of Hit Points.

2) Admit possibly the most fundamental driver of the edition wars (which bled like a sieve into and throughout the playtest period); the need to have the designers "tell you" your playstyle is orthodox, majority, normative. That D&D is "yours."

3) Avowed subscription to "Golden Rule"/AD&D 2e era GM Force-driven games as your playstyle...which 5e (IMO coherently and be design) facilitates.

In these conversations, it is so difficult to get folks to just speak plainly about these things. You try so hard for transparency, to tease things out, but its really difficult to get people to flatly state any of 1, 2, or 3 above. So thank you for being so frank and open. Its refreshing.

 

[Parmandur]

I'll post something with a little more meat when I have a moment (I was thinking about composing a D&D family tree or further breaking down how TotM is fascilitated or hampered by a ruleset). I just want to say though, I truly appreciate your sincerity and candor Parmandur. I'm not being sarcastic. In the above you:

1) Espouse the virtues of Rocket Tag and Bags of Hit Points.

2) Admit possibly the most fundamental driver of the edition wars (which bled like a sieve into and throughout the playtest period); the need to have the designers "tell you" your playstyle is orthodox, majority, normative. That D&D is "yours."

3) Avowed subscription to "Golden Rule"/AD&D 2e era GM Force-driven games as your playstyle...which 5e (IMO coherently and be design) facilitates.

In these conversations, it is so difficult to get folks to just speak plainly about these things. You try so hard for transparency, to tease things out, but its really difficult to get people to flatly state any of 1, 2, or 3 above. So thank you for being so frank and open. Its refreshing.

Well, thank you; I am honestly attempting to understand the experiential phenomenon I and others went thru, and where they diverge.

As to point 2, I don't *need* the designers to let me know my group wasn't as weird as I thought it was. In college, I was proud of the group being weird, but it was interesting to learn it really wasn't so much.

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[AbdulAlhazred]

Heh, that last part is just about right; but I think the game is designed to have that effect in play: martial are not being overshadowed by spellcasters at our table.

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But I seemed to have the opposite experience with 5e. As an old-school wizard expert I found 5e's spell-casting rules to be a bonanza of ways to make a powerful wizard that had the rest of the party mostly for his side-kicks. They WERE a good bit more combat-effective even at mid-higher levels than in 2e, but spell-casters still set the agenda. I think you can viably craft a 'no casters' kind of game that isn't completely nerfed, etc, which is a huge step up from 3.x and certainly a step up from 2e, in which games non-casters were all VERY definitely '2nd tier' except at low level.

Still, I wouldn't put any 5e non-caster party up against a wizard, not one played like it wants to win.

 

[Caliburn101]

Case in point. If you don't want to look the part of the h4ter, don't run so many plays from their book.

I don't actually know what the 'haters' arguments were, and I don't care, which is clearly part of my point.

However, if the ONE point (not 'plays' as you put it...) I am making was indeed one of the points they raised, it does at least prove that labelling someone a 'hater' or indeed a 'fanboi' does not automatically invalidate everything they are saying, it is merely a lazy and dismissive attempt to make it appear so.

I regard the overall crunch approach taken by 4th Edition to be an outlier in the evolution of D&D over the decades.

That's it.

If that was indeed a hater point, well that's 'nice' but it's irrelevant to my point of view.

 

[Imaro]

Sorry, it seemed to me that the gist of the assertions about 5e was that it is such a superior entre to D&D than 4e was. That was what I got out of that line of discussion in general, but perhaps I've just been reading too many other posts and can't keep it all straight? I'm not sure...

No worries... But I wasn't commenting on 4e either way... I was addressing the statements made by the poster I quoted as far as the type of game 5e is... aimed at grognards, undoing everything that made D&D good, a game that isn't fit for the future. I just find it odd that statements like this are XP'd and agreed with when they are just edition war rhetoric. The funny thing is that I think most 5e fans just choose to ignore stuff like this... but there's this narrative that gets perpetrated (mostly by some 4e fans) that it doesn't happen because 4e fans don't edition war and that's just not true... so was choosing to highlight this example.

I wasn't attacking 5e either. I was just saying "gosh, 4e seemed like a perfectly good entre to D&D", but there's no way to measure how many new players there are now vs say 9 years ago. Also, I don't think that just because a game was PRIMARILY aimed at satisfying long-time D&D players that this would automatically make it bad in any particular respect, such as an entry point for new players.

No I didn't think you were but the post I quoted that you (and a few others) XP'd certainly was.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think edition is a big factor in new player acquisition in D&D. Players join games and learn the rules at play at the time they join, and then maybe they learn other versions of the game if they stick around. I doubt one or another version has made that much harder or easier.

I don't think edition per se is either but the comments I was addressing were about the actual game which, if they were true, should amount to no one besides grognards wanted to play 5e... which we know isn't the case.

 

[Imaro]

First, just to get a possible confusion out of the way - I prefer a game that is overt about its design principles and the play experience it sets out (and, hopefull, does) deliver. That's why Luke Crane's Burning Wheel is my favourite set of RPG rules from the point of view of writing (I like them a lot in play too); and why I like other clearly-written rulesets too (eg Maelstrom Storytelling, bits of Over the Edge, HeroQuest revised, Marvel Heroic RP most of the time, and bits of 4e).

But second, I don't think my preference is universal. I'm not even sure it's very widespread. I think a significant number of RPGers - perhaps even a majority - prefer that the rules not talk about their underlying concepts or the way they are intended to yield a certain play experience, because that is already too much "pulling back of the curtain". They want the experience of immersion/verisimilitude to extend from play even into engaging with the rulebooks.

Honestly I think the majority of gamers just don't care. They don't analyze rpg's to the extent you do, they don't care about Forge theory, they have a simple criteria... was the game fun when I ran/played it. Now a game could set it's principles out, and provide transparency and all that but if ultiumately the experience it provides isn't fun for that particular player or DM well then how well designed and transparent it is doesn't mean anything because it wasn't fun. I would even go so far as to say many people (including me) would rather have a game that is "incoherent" and isn't beating them over the head with it's goals and ways to do things... that they can shape to their own specifications with a little work than a game that is well designed but with so much transparency, pushing of goals, etc that it feels restrained and on top of that isn't the style of game they have come to expect from a certain brand. I mean seriously the vast majority of gamers don't sit around and discuss game theory or design... they just play and are concerned with how that specific experience played out.

 

[MwaO]

But I seemed to have the opposite experience with 5e. As an old-school wizard expert I found 5e's spell-casting rules to be a bonanza of ways to make a powerful wizard that had the rest of the party mostly for his side-kicks. They WERE a good bit more combat-effective even at mid-higher levels than in 2e, but spell-casters still set the agenda. I think you can viably craft a 'no casters' kind of game that isn't completely nerfed, etc, which is a huge step up from 3.x and certainly a step up from 2e, in which games non-casters were all VERY definitely '2nd tier' except at low level.

Still, I wouldn't put any 5e non-caster party up against a wizard, not one played like it wants to win.

Yeah, I think one thing to note is just how crazy complex casters are in 5e. An enchantment Wizard with a 20 Int at 8th level has 13 known spells+4 cantrips. Assuming 2 cantrips are attack options and 1 known spell is Mage Armor, that's 12+2+2(Enchantment)=16 nearly at-will options assuming I have a 4th level spell slot in reserve for emergencies.

Most players of casters aren't capable of handling that kind of complexity and shut down, spamming the same 2-5 spells over and over again. Or they spend a really long time agonizing over the options and making everyone annoyed.

But if you're actually good at playing Wizards, they're amazing. And Variant Human can pick up the Alert feat at 1st level so as to have a +8 Initiative. This is straightforward stuff that lets the Variant Wizard blow encounters up. "Hey, I go first? I cast Hypnotic Pattern." "Hey, I go first? I cast Fireball." "Hey, I go first? I cast Confusion." "Hey, I cast Polymorph or Summon Minor Elemental because we're about to go through a series of rooms really fast..."

Etc...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I think one thing to note is just how crazy complex casters are in 5e. An enchantment Wizard with a 20 Int at 8th level has 13 known spells+4 cantrips. Assuming 2 cantrips are attack options and 1 known spell is Mage Armor, that's 12+2+2(Enchantment)=16 nearly at-will options assuming I have a 4th level spell slot in reserve for emergencies.

Most players of casters aren't capable of handling that kind of complexity and shut down, spamming the same 2-5 spells over and over again. Or they spend a really long time agonizing over the options and making everyone annoyed.

But if you're actually good at playing Wizards, they're amazing. And Variant Human can pick up the Alert feat at 1st level so as to have a +8 Initiative. This is straightforward stuff that lets the Variant Wizard blow encounters up. "Hey, I go first? I cast Hypnotic Pattern." "Hey, I go first? I cast Fireball." "Hey, I go first? I cast Confusion." "Hey, I cast Polymorph or Summon Minor Elemental because we're about to go through a series of rooms really fast..."

Etc...

Polymorph! hehehehehe. I can't tell you how many encounters ended with my Transmuter opening the fight with "and now you're a goldfish!" The real eye-opener was when we got into a situation where he was turned against the rest of the party, and sequentially beat each of the other 4 characters with a single spell (actually it was a mirror image of my character, so in fact he had to beat the ACTUAL character too, so it was 5). I think it was the third guy, the battlemaster, that finally managed to stabby on him and he barely lost, but it was a terrible tactical situation for the wizard, small room full of enemies. If he'd been say outdoors, forget it. The other PCs DO deliver LOADS of damage, but the wizard is the one that changes the rules. It was a LOT less that way in 4e (though my 4e utility wizard was still pretty awesome and got close to a 5e level of significance).