Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9575085" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Yeah, from a 10,000 mile design view, 4e was very clarifying about what the &quot;mundane&quot; aesthetic means in D&amp;D to a chunk of players. You can't just take feedback like &quot;it's not realistic&quot; or &quot;I just want to be an average guy who picked up a sword&quot; or &quot;they gave fighters spells&quot; on their face, and I think pointing back to a general set of abilities shared by all characters gets to what all of that stuff is actually swirling around.Speaking from a sharply limited subset of players who (more or less) started to play with 3e, I had internalized this not as a design goal, but as an actual norm of the entire medium. It simply did not occur to me that you could design a game where this wasn't true, or that if you did, then it must be a mistake or an error. It's hard to explain how much 4e was a massive culture shock at the time.In retrospect, I've gone back and looked at other games and third party products from the time and had to completely reevaluate them as a result of that shift. There's whole products I would have simply evaluated as bad or incomplete design at the time that I can see the basis for now.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9575085, member: 6690965"] Yeah, from a 10,000 mile design view, 4e was very clarifying about what the "mundane" aesthetic means in D&D to a chunk of players. You can't just take feedback like "it's not realistic" or "I just want to be an average guy who picked up a sword" or "they gave fighters spells" on their face, and I think pointing back to a general set of abilities shared by all characters gets to what all of that stuff is actually swirling around. Speaking from a sharply limited subset of players who (more or less) started to play with 3e, I had internalized this not as a design goal, but as an actual norm of the entire medium. It simply did not occur to me that you could design a game where this wasn't true, or that if you did, then it must be a mistake or an error. It's hard to explain how much 4e was a massive culture shock at the time. In retrospect, I've gone back and looked at other games and third party products from the time and had to completely reevaluate them as a result of that shift. There's whole products I would have simply evaluated as bad or incomplete design at the time that I can see the basis for now. [/QUOTE]

Verification