D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[doctorbadwolf]

4E had a broken build several days before the phb came out. Ramger killing Orcus one. They nerfed it in errata.

Kinda ironic at the time people were singing its praises. It was an unbalanced mess just hid it better than 3E.

I remember a lot of us not thinking that build was a big deal outside of white rooms.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

I think the biggest factor, as with so many things, was simple demographics: all us Gen Xers got to an age where:

1. We had enough time, money and nostalgia to revisit our youthful passions
2. We had kids that we were more than happy to support getting into D&D.

And then WotC cleverly made 5e very recognizable and comfortable for us grognards, to make both of the above easy decisions for a lot of folks. Many of the pop culture references you cite happened because those creators were into D&D back in the day and now old enough to do something about it. And then the new streaming phenomenon built on an already primed audience.

Yeah, I can buy that. People who liked D&D and fantasy in general were in positions of power to make these other media, which influenced a younger demographic (among other things).

Tangent thought. One mystery for me -- I don't think I've ever seen a TV pop portrayal of D&D depict it 100% accurately. Some capture the flavor pretty well (Stranger Things, Freaks and Geeks) but there is always some weird inaccuracy that seems like it doesn't really have to be there to maintain drama and must have been caught by the Gen Xers but they decided to keep in anyway (rolling a d20 for fireball attack, etc.). Weird.

 

[Deset Gled]

Tangent thought. One mystery for me -- I don't think I've ever seen a TV pop portrayal of D&D depict it 100% accurately. Some capture the flavor pretty well (Stranger Things, Freaks and Geeks) but there is always some weird inaccuracy that seems like it doesn't really have to be there to maintain drama and must have been caught by the Gen Xers but they decided to keep in anyway (rolling a d20 for fireball attack, etc.). Weird.

To be fair, you've probably never seen a 100% accurate portrayal of a gunshot wound in an Emergency Room or a murderer being arrested and tried, either. And those have entire genres of shows and movies based on them.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

4E had a broken build several days before the phb came out. Ramger killing Orcus one. They nerfed it in errata.

Kinda ironic at the time people were singing its praises. It was an unbalanced mess just hid it better than 3E.

No, it was in fact quite balanced. The reason no one took that "build" seriously is because it required you to never ever miss an attack, because the way it was originally written, the action in question triggered another attempt to attack for each time you hit.

This was addressed with errata almost immediately when they realized that it was possible to get very high hit bonuses, making it so you might go many attacks before missing. IIRC, it was still impossible to guarantee that you'd hit, so it would terminate eventually, just not soon enough to do an appropriate amount of damage.

I would also like to remind you that "doing nigh-infinite damage on a single attack" is by far the LEAST broken thing you can do in D&D 3e. Natural Spell, all by itself, is more broken than an entire high-level-epic Ranger build focused completely on cheesing one single power the one time you can use it per day (as, IIRC, this was a daily power.) And the insane power of Natural Spell was never addressed.

But I will say, I at least appreciate that you are complaining about actual issues 4e had, instead of ones it never had. I've seen far too much of the latter.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't think I've ever seen a TV pop portrayal of D&D depict it 100% accurately.

TV, apparently, gets literally everything wrong. You only notice with the stuff you actually really know. Which is sobering, if you realize that the only time you do notice it is when they depict a nerd game from the 80s.

 

[Tony Vargas]

No, it was in fact quite balanced. The reason no one took that "build" seriously is because it required you to never ever miss an attack, because the way it was originally written, the action in question triggered another attempt to attack for each time you hit.

This was addressed with errata almost immediately

That's a big difference between 4e and 5e, the first two years, 4e put out frequent updates to close loopholes and fix errors in wording. There were some pretty stupid things you could do, at first, if you willfully misconstrued phrasing... (there still are, in later materials, since they stopped such updates with Essentials).
5e has numerous such loopholes - CharOP types have dubbed them 'tech' this time around - and 5e is fine with leaving them uncorrected for 10 years. DM's have probably fixed them, themselves, in various ways, and wouldn't like being told they'd done it wrong by seeing an official fix.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's a big difference between 4e and 5e, the first two years, 4e put out frequent updates to close loopholes and fix errors in wording. There were some pretty stupid things you could do, at first, if you willfully misconstrued phrasing... (there still are, in later materials, since they stopped such updates with Essentials).
5e has numerous such loopholes - CharOP types have dubbed them 'tech' this time around - and 5e is fine with leaving them uncorrected for 10 years. DM's have probably fixed them, themselves, in various ways, and wouldn't like being told they'd done it wrong by seeing an official fix.

Too many updates, IMO. Hence the phantom 4e release, "the Complete Errata Handbook".

 

[cbwjm]

Too many updates, IMO. Hence the phantom 4e release, "the Complete Errata Handbook".

I was curious and looked up 4e errata, there was 140 pages! It does cover everything though so it includes dragon magazine as well as the book releases and would have been shorter had they not written out full abilities after describing the errata, but still, that's a lot.

 

[Zardnaar]

No, it was in fact quite balanced. The reason no one took that "build" seriously is because it required you to never ever miss an attack, because the way it was originally written, the action in question triggered another attempt to attack for each time you hit.

This was addressed with errata almost immediately when they realized that it was possible to get very high hit bonuses, making it so you might go many attacks before missing. IIRC, it was still impossible to guarantee that you'd hit, so it would terminate eventually, just not soon enough to do an appropriate amount of damage.

I would also like to remind you that "doing nigh-infinite damage on a single attack" is by far the LEAST broken thing you can do in D&D 3e. Natural Spell, all by itself, is more broken than an entire high-level-epic Ranger build focused completely on cheesing one single power the one time you can use it per day (as, IIRC, this was a daily power.) And the insane power of Natural Spell was never addressed.

But I will say, I at least appreciate that you are complaining about actual issues 4e had, instead of ones it never had. I've seen far too much of the latter.

140 pages of errata.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Too many updates, IMO. Hence the phantom 4e release, "the Complete Errata Handbook".

One of the conspiracy theories of the day was that they were trying to force you to subscribe to DDI so your stuff would be automatically updated.