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

[Tony Vargas]

I imagine the emotional "this doesn't feel like realz D&D!!!1" reaction is a reflexive way of trying to express "well, these rules don't quite fit my play style, that's unfortunate."

There was a lot of hand-wringing back in the trenches of the edition war about 'play style,' something that had hardly ever garnered comment in the past, but no, that's just begging the question: both are subjective and don't address the actual differences.

Both are also emotional appeals at least as much as emotional reactions. One accuses the game of betrayal of an ideal, the other, even less credibly, of persecution. Maybe there were some emotional reactions being expressed, maybe there was some calculated manipulation going on, probably there was both and they could end up looking pretty similar from the outside.

That can be pretty jarring if your play style is your wholr experience of D&D, and 3.x warts and all managed to be a big tent for play styles, if nothing else...

3.x managed no such thing, not even close! Fans of the classic game were already chaffing at the player-focused attitude of 3.x (it wasn't as dramatic as the edition war, but there were just as unfounded criticisms flying at 3.0 from the beginning, just not from such committed partisans), and the way it supposedly* undercut one of the two styles (that pemerton articulated, above - the second one, in case that's not obvious) for which the classic game was suitable (even as it's system-mastery-rewards opened up a couple of new player-focused styles, optimization** and PvP, for instance). 3.x was different from the classic game and from 4e, but it's community was far too RAW-obsessed, and its mechanics too imbalanced, to be used in wide range of styles - it didn't manage the little bit of legerdemain that 5e did in getting the community back to trusting their DMs to take the game in other directions, whether with rulings or modifications.

I suppose that the 'style' thing might have been silently building up over the editions. AD&D was different, arguably more simulationist, I suppose, from 0D&D, and Arduin purported to pick up D&D's true legacy, 2e tried to be more story-oriented even if more in presentation than mechanics, 3e was more player-oriented, 4e better balanced. Each of those shifted the focus of the game around. Arguably, once the idea of a playstyle was articulated, you could say that those different focuses 'supported' (or over-rewarded, or forced) certain play styles.

Though, 'support,' as our conversation has illustrated, can be a tricky idea. You, for instance, clearly feel that no mechanical tools at all constitutes 'support for TotM' in the case of 5e, while the presence of better tools for minis & grid does not in any way take away from that support for TotM in 3.5, yet slightly more streamlined mini/grid tools make TotM impossible under 4e. So, yeah, 'support' can be a fraught subject.

(And, yes, that inconsistency in opinion perhaps comes down to the original 'feelz' idea.)

Anyway: Style. To the extent that it's a thing influenced my system, style can be rewarded, allowed, or penalized (and the line for supported might be subjectively drawn anywhere along a continuum including those three). If a system is hypothetically style-neutral, you /can/ play it under any style, but there won't be a tendency for a certain style to develop or be hard to maintain because of the system, rather, play will naturally tend towards whatever style(s) the players prefer. If a system rewards one style over another, play will tend to drift towards the favored style if it's compatible with the preferred style of anyone at the table, at all.

If you want everyone playing in the same style (at your own table, not an unreasonable thing to want), without using social mechanisms (like, oh, talking to your players about it) to make that happen, picking a system that over-rewards the desired style and punishes others would be helpful. If you've been doing that to good result for a long while, and change to a system that doesn't favor that style as much, even allows more alternate styles that were never really in the running, before, then you might be shocked to see play drifting away from your preferred style and towards those that, perhaps only out of novelty after playing in the system-favored style for so long, appeal to other players.
You might then say that the new system 'doesn't support' your style of play.

One quality that makes a system suitable for play in a wider range of styles, by virtue of not over-rewarding one or disfavoring others, is, of course, /balance/.





















* it's not like 3e set out to dis-empower DMs, it had Rule 0 right at the front, and nothing the /system/ could do could prevent a DM from overruling or modding it. That credit has to be shared with the community groupthink that rapidly developed around it.

** calling optimization a style maybe does both terms a disservice. Optimization can be used in the service of player-focused styles, whether that's by using it to the game a chargen or paint a detailed picture of a character or whatever quality you're optimizing a character for. It can even be an enjoyable (meta-) game in its own right.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I imagine the emotional "this doesn't feel like realz D&D!!!1" reaction is a reflexive way of trying to express "well, these rules don't quite fit my play style, that's unfortunate." That can be pretty jarring if your play style is your wholr experience of D&D, and 3.x warts and all managed to be a big tent for play styles, if nothing else...

Honestly, my evaluation of 3.x is it was BAD at supporting anything but its actual play style. I mean, sure people engineered various differing ways to play by either very significant table conventions, or actually hacking the heck out of the game (E6 for instance, which I find very prevalent). Truthfully any attempt to play 'stock' 3.x is at the very least bound to lead to a strange game of utter caster dominance almost inevitably.

I think what 3e/d20 provided was a fairly generalized system that could be extended in a lot of directions and which invested a lot of its specific character in class design and subsystems like magic. That means you can fairly cleanly slice away a lot of its character and create alternative kinds of game, like Iron Heroes, or many of the various d20 non-D&D systems have.

4e is really more of a specific direction, you can likewise slice away large pieces of it, but because its systems are more cohesive you will run into somewhat more effort. For example its easy enough to drop D&D-style casting from 3.x but its a little bit different proposition to remove powers from 4e, since they underpin all classes, items, a lot of the feat system, etc. You could do it, or you could graft say Vancian casting classes onto 4e.

Still, in terms of USING 4e to play in different styles, it proves to be pretty flexible within the general heroic-action family of genres. You can play superhero type games, something approaching classic D&D, over-the-top high fantasy, wire-fu, etc without really needing to change the rules so much as just providing the right color. 3.x had problems in this regard, the extreme inherent superiority of spell casting, the clunky 'full turn action' mess, etc made only specific sorts of play 'work' without actual rules hacking. You could supply whatever color you wanted, but combat still came down to spell-casting rocket tag pretty quickly.

 

[Parmandur]

There was a lot of hand-wringing back in the trenches of the edition war about 'play style,' something that had hardly ever garnered comment in the past, but no, that's just begging the question: both are subjective and don't address the actual differences.

Both are also emotional appeals at least as much as emotional reactions. One accuses the game of betrayal of an ideal, the other, even less credibly, of persecution. Maybe there were some emotional reactions being expressed, maybe there was some calculated manipulation going on, probably there was both and they could end up looking pretty similar from the outside.

3.x managed no such thing, not even close! Fans of the classic game were already chaffing at the player-focused attitude of 3.x (it wasn't as dramatic as the edition war, but there were just as unfounded criticisms flying at 3.0 from the beginning, just not from such committed partisans), and the way it supposedly* undercut one of the two styles (that pemerton articulated, above - the second one, in case that's not obvious) for which the classic game was suitable (even as it's system-mastery-rewards opened up a couple of new player-focused styles, optimization** and PvP, for instance). 3.x was different from the classic game and from 4e, but it's community was far too RAW-obsessed, and its mechanics too imbalanced, to be used in wide range of styles - it didn't manage the little bit of legerdemain that 5e did in getting the community back to trusting their DMs to take the game in other directions, whether with rulings or modifications.

I suppose that the 'style' thing might have been silently building up over the editions. AD&D was different, arguably more simulationist, I suppose, from 0D&D, and Arduin purported to pick up D&D's true legacy, 2e tried to be more story-oriented even if more in presentation than mechanics, 3e was more player-oriented, 4e better balanced. Each of those shifted the focus of the game around. Arguably, once the idea of a playstyle was articulated, you could say that those different focuses 'supported' (or over-rewarded, or forced) certain play styles.

Though, 'support,' as our conversation has illustrated, can be a tricky idea. You, for instance, clearly feel that no mechanical tools at all constitutes 'support for TotM' in the case of 5e, while the presence of better tools for minis & grid does not in any way take away from that support for TotM in 3.5, yet slightly more streamlined mini/grid tools make TotM impossible under 4e. So, yeah, 'support' can be a fraught subject.

(And, yes, that inconsistency in opinion perhaps comes down to the original 'feelz' idea.)

Anyway: Style. To the extent that it's a thing influenced my system, style can be rewarded, allowed, or penalized (and the line for supported might be subjectively drawn anywhere along a continuum including those three). If a system is hypothetically style-neutral, you /can/ play it under any style, but there won't be a tendency for a certain style to develop or be hard to maintain because of the system, rather, play will naturally tend towards whatever style(s) the players prefer. If a system rewards one style over another, play will tend to drift towards the favored style if it's compatible with the preferred style of anyone at the table, at all.

If you want everyone playing in the same style (at your own table, not an unreasonable thing to want), without using social mechanisms (like, oh, talking to your players about it) to make that happen, picking a system that over-rewards the desired style and punishes others would be helpful. If you've been doing that to good result for a long while, and change to a system that doesn't favor that style as much, even allows more alternate styles that were never really in the running, before, then you might be shocked to see play drifting away from your preferred style and towards those that, perhaps only out of novelty after playing in the system-favored style for so long, appeal to other players.
You might then say that the new system 'doesn't support' your style of play.

One quality that makes a system suitable for play in a wider range of styles, by virtue of not over-rewarding one or disfavoring others, is, of course, /balance/.





















* it's not like 3e set out to dis-empower DMs, it had Rule 0 right at the front, and nothing the /system/ could do could prevent a DM from overruling or modding it. That credit has to be shared with the community groupthink that rapidly developed around it.

** calling optimization a style maybe does both terms a disservice. Optimization can be used in the service of player-focused styles, whether that's by using it to the game a chargen or paint a detailed picture of a character or whatever quality you're optimizing a character for. It can even be an enjoyable (meta-) game in its own right.

Presentation can have a tremendous impact on reception: 4E may have had streamlined grid rules, but it was presented in the books in a way much harder to ignore than 3.x (or so it felt, and the subjective experience was not isolated). A big part of that seems to me to have been a commercial push, because selling lots of miniatures or a VTT was seen as desirable on the corporate front: tellingly, WotC has given up on doing both themselves, letting third parties license and pursue those fields on their own initiative and dime.

My idea of what constitutes "D&D" is pretty broad, since I would call Arduin, Rubequest and RM/MERP "D&D" as well as the mainline editions...

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[Parmandur]

Honestly, my evaluation of 3.x is it was BAD at supporting anything but its actual play style. I mean, sure people engineered various differing ways to play by either very significant table conventions, or actually hacking the heck out of the game (E6 for instance, which I find very prevalent). Truthfully any attempt to play 'stock' 3.x is at the very least bound to lead to a strange game of utter caster dominance almost inevitably.

I think what 3e/d20 provided was a fairly generalized system that could be extended in a lot of directions and which invested a lot of its specific character in class design and subsystems like magic. That means you can fairly cleanly slice away a lot of its character and create alternative kinds of game, like Iron Heroes, or many of the various d20 non-D&D systems have.

4e is really more of a specific direction, you can likewise slice away large pieces of it, but because its systems are more cohesive you will run into somewhat more effort. For example its easy enough to drop D&D-style casting from 3.x but its a little bit different proposition to remove powers from 4e, since they underpin all classes, items, a lot of the feat system, etc. You could do it, or you could graft say Vancian casting classes onto 4e.

Still, in terms of USING 4e to play in different styles, it proves to be pretty flexible within the general heroic-action family of genres. You can play superhero type games, something approaching classic D&D, over-the-top high fantasy, wire-fu, etc without really needing to change the rules so much as just providing the right color. 3.x had problems in this regard, the extreme inherent superiority of spell casting, the clunky 'full turn action' mess, etc made only specific sorts of play 'work' without actual rules hacking. You could supply whatever color you wanted, but combat still came down to spell-casting rocket tag pretty quickly.

Yes, I think you are right here: 4E is far more systematic, so harder to effectively homebrew: you can do it, clearly, and correct me if I am wrong, but 4E homebrewing seems to have been less prevalent than with 3.x or 5E; leaving aside the hope of turning a homebrew into a viable product that the OGL provides over the GSL. The system is tight, and doesn't invite tinkering in the same way: a strength or a weakness, depending on perspective.

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[Tony Vargas]

Presentation can have a tremendous impact on reception

It is a more plausible scenario that the botched introduction poisoned the well, than that he system differences freaked people out. Though both were probably contributing factors that synergized - if WotC hadn't been so infuriating, there might have been some willingness to give the new systems a fair chance.

4E may have had streamlined grid rules, but it was presented in the books in a way much harder to ignore than 3.x

It was a common criticism of 3.x that it was 'grid dependent' and it was impossible to ignore the intrusive use of AoOs and templates and spaces and diagonals (&c) to run it any other way. Since you habitually played 3.5 TotM, you'd obviously find that criticism entirely unfounded. You make a similar criticism of 4e, which is similarly, unfounded.

A big part of that seems to me to have been a commercial push, because selling lots of miniatures

WotC started selling blind/random minis with 3.0, and only amped it up with 3.5, so yeah, that's an understandable assumption.

The 'grid' oriented mechanics, though, started with 2e C&T, under TSR, and before platic minis were being pushed like that.

So the correlation is there, but the causation was probably the reverse: they started selling minis because the rules had already evolved towards making them more useful. (And, of course, sold them blind/random, because they're the folks that brought you M:tG).

or a VTT was seen as desirable on the corporate front

The VTT never materialized in a way that made money for WotC, though.

Yes, I think you are right here: 4E is far more systematic, so harder to effectively homebrew: you can do it, clearly, and correct me if I am wrong, but 4E homebrewing seems to have been less prevalent than with 3.x or 5E

Homebrewing was less prevalent - and less respected, really, under 3.x and 4e than under 5e or in the era of the classic game. A consequence, I think it's pretty clear, of the player-orientation of the other two modern editions, than of their mechanics, though both figured into it. (ie, in 3.x, the mechanics rewarded system mastery, so players resisted home-brewing which might undermine said mastery; in 4e, the mechanics were so carefully balanced that DMs resisted homebrewing, not wanting to disrupt that balance)

However, it also depends on the area being homebrewed. In 3e you could customize monsters to the same degree as PCs or use the same item creation rules as players to make novel magic items. That's homebrewing using system tools, but it's still homebrewing in a sense. Similarly, in 4e, making/changing up monsters (and their powers), designing skill challenges, finding alternate uses for the disease track, reducing daily surges, varying the availability of short & long rests, increasing monster damage, decreasing hps across the board, and changing the rules on rituals were all not uncommon variants - they were just applied in ways that didn't reduce player 'agency' or threaten class balance (though the point was sometimes to tweak encounter balance.

In the same way that 3e primed the community to commit to RAW (in spite of Rule 0), 5e primes the pump for DM Empowerment in several ways, including fostering broad acceptance of homebrewing with ambiguous natural language over precise/clear jargon (and consequently less reliable rewards for system mastery), and subordinating balance as a design consideration. But it was ultimately the community that would become accepting or not.
It went very well, that way.

leaving aside the hope of turning a homebrew into a viable product that the OGL provides over the GSL.

A hard thing to leave aside, for 3pps, but not, I think, a major consideration for most homebrewers.

 

[Garthanos]

I feel 4e makes many forms of tinkering easier and more predictable in results than other versions AND It only doesnt invite tinkering in the "damn this is a broke and obviously unintended effect" kind of way but to each their own.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Honestly, my evaluation of 3.x is it was BAD at supporting anything but its actual play style.

Not unfair, exactly. That style of play could include a lot of player-customization of PCs, which could, in turn, take the game in quite different directions.

I think what 3e/d20 provided was a fairly generalized system that could be extended in a lot of directions and which invested a lot of its specific character in class design and subsystems like magic. That means you can fairly cleanly slice away a lot of its character and create alternative kinds of game, like Iron Heroes, or many of the various d20 non-D&D systems have.

Yes, d20 was very much a 'core system' like BRP or TFT or Interlock or d6 (among others - it seemed every publisher re-cycled enough rules from one game to the next that they had at least a de-facto 'core system') were in the 80s - a basic skeleton of resolution an character-creation mechanics that could be fleshed out into a variety of games, and that facilitated a group going from one of those games to another without starting from scratch. d20 was /also/, like FUDGE and Fuzion were in the 90s, more or less open-source (FUDGE was a lot more open-source!), which really worked out well (arguably a little too well for Hasbro's liking, or we woudn't have gotten the GSL) when combined with the first-RPG mystique of D&D.

4e is really more of a specific direction, you can likewise slice away large pieces of it, but because its systems are more cohesive you will run into somewhat more effort. For example its easy enough to drop D&D-style casting from 3.x but its a little bit different proposition to remove powers from 4e, since they underpin all classes, items, a lot of the feat system, etc.

It was also less necessary, since fluff & crunch weren't so tightly coupled. You can cleave a power source off 4e for instance, creating a very different world, without wrecking the game because a specific PC function had been niche-protected for that source. You could re-skin powers, or selectively ignore specific powers that didn't fit a theme of campaign or style of play.

Still, in terms of USING 4e to play in different styles, it proves to be pretty flexible

Yeah, OK, you got there.

 

[Parmandur]

It is a more plausible scenario that the botched introduction poisoned the well, than that he system differences freaked people out. Though both were probably contributing factors that synergized - if WotC hadn't been so infuriating, there might have been some willingness to give the new systems a fair chance.

It was a common criticism of 3.x that it was 'grid dependent' and it was impossible to ignore the intrusive use of AoOs and templates and spaces and diagonals (&c) to run it any other way. Since you habitually played 3.5 TotM, you'd obviously find that criticism entirely unfounded. You make a similar criticism of 4e, which is similarly, unfounded.

WotC started selling blind/random minis with 3.0, and only amped it up with 3.5, so yeah, that's an understandable assumption.

The 'grid' oriented mechanics, though, started with 2e C&T, under TSR, and before platic minis were being pushed like that.

So the correlation is there, but the causation was probably the reverse: they started selling minis because the rules had already evolved towards making them more useful. (And, of course, sold them blind/random, because they're the folks that brought you M:tG).

[quipte] or a VTT was seen as desirable on the corporate front

The VTT never materialized in a way that made money for WotC, though.

Homebrewing was less prevalent - and less respected, really, under 3.x and 4e than under 5e or in the era of the classic game. A consequence, I think it's pretty clear, of the player-orientation of the other two modern editions, than of their mechanics, though both figured into it. (ie, in 3.x, the mechanics rewarded system mastery, so players resisted home-brewing which might undermine said mastery; in 4e, the mechanics were so carefully balanced that DMs resisted homebrewing, not wanting to disrupt that balance)

However, it also depends on the area being homebrewed. In 3e you could customize monsters to the same degree as PCs or use the same item creation rules as players to make novel magic items. That's homebrewing using system tools, but it's still homebrewing in a sense. Similarly, in 4e, making/changing up monsters (and their powers), designing skill challenges, finding alternate uses for the disease track, reducing daily surges, varying the availability of short & long rests, increasing monster damage, decreasing hps across the board, and changing the rules on rituals were all not uncommon variants - they were just applied in ways that didn't reduce player 'agency' or threaten class balance (though the point was sometimes to tweak encounter balance.

In the same way that 3e primed the community to commit to RAW (in spite of Rule 0), 5e primes the pump for DM Empowerment in several ways, including broad acceptance of homebrewing, in a number of ways, including ambiguous natural language over precise/clear jargon (and consequently less reliable rewards for system mastery), and subordinating balance as a design consideration. But it was ultimately the community that would become accepting or not.
It went very well, that way.

A hard thing to leave aside, for 3pps, but not, I think, a major consideration for most homebrewers.[/QUOTE]
Actually, despite my personal experience that it was just fine, I would say in retrospect that the criticisms were valid: we just did it anyways, but 5E makes it way easier to play as we did than 3.x did. I'm sure it would be doable with 4E, but it would require more working against the system...and the system for which books were already owned was working.

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[Garthanos]

Not unfair, exactly. That style of play could include a lot of player-customization of PCs, which could, in turn, take the game in quite different directions.

Right like in 4e if I build a non-combatant player character they are still - "an action adventure hero who contributes when the hits the fan"

 

[Tony Vargas]

Actually, despite my personal experience that it was just fine, I would say in retrospect that the criticisms were valid: we just did it anyways, but 5E makes it way easier to play as we did than 3.x did.

That's in reference 3.x being 'grid dependent,' I take it. The criticisms were lodged against real things present in 3.x - AoOs, positioning, counting diagonals, etc - but the sense of them, that it somehow (relative to AD&D, mind you, which was still pretty close to D&D wargaming roots in its 1st edition) prevented you from running the game 'TotM' (or, I suppose, even on non-gridded surface), was baseless. 4e & 5e were no better or worse in that sense - none of them gave support for the TotM method of tracking movement & position.

I'm sure it would be doable with 4E, but it would require more working against the system...

AFAICT, we're on the issue of homebrewing, here, and no, you're not really working a 'against the system' when homebrewing, rather, the headwind you can face comes from your players. In 3.x, players are empowered by choice & rewards for system mastery that are all predicated upon the rules being sacrosanct, any change could 'nerf' a combo or wreck a build, so resistance to homebrewing could be substantial. In 4e the player choices were still there, but as balance was more robust, the rewards for system mastery were lest modest, so the defense of same less entrenched. In 5e, the system calls for DM rulings from basic resolution on, so players become conditioned to accepting those, /and/ it presents modules and optional rules from the PH on - it's thus a small step to accept a homebrew modification or variant - and the optimal strategy is no longer mastering the system, but gaming the DM.