This can be quite individual. For instance, I found Worlds & Monsters to be the best treatment of D&D story elements ever, and the tight integration of story elements into the game (including mechanics) has been a big attraction of the edition for me.
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The Great D&D Schism: The End of an age and the scattering of gamers
- Thread starter wingsandsword
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Desdichado
Hero
Not to me, no.
This was just a one-liner. I'm not going anywhere with this that I haven't already gone.
tomBitonti
Hero
I'm interested in exploring the differences in our perspectives.
Lots of possible explanations, but let me start instead with my basic reactions to 4E materials. I found myself unable to read most 4E published material, as I have and continue to do often with other material. I used to read through Dungeon adventures, and although I found many to be oddly build and unusable (to me), I usually was able to enjoy reading them, and able to gather some useful concepts from most. That would be, a short story line or plot, plus NPC and monster characterizations and motivations, and I could often tie the adventure to a larger context. I really didn't get that from the 4E publications, and I've tried reading quite a few.
I'm comparing the material not just against earlier (1E, 2E, 3E) materiel, but also against Pathfinder and Fantasy Flight Games. Fantasy Flight has several RPGs build around the WarHammer 40K universe. Especially compared with Pathfinder and Fantasy Flight, the 4E publications shine a very pale light.
As a strange example which is prompted by my subconscious, I'm reminded about the set of sketches that are in the 2E Return to the Tomb of Horrors boxed set, which shows images of a party making their way through the adventure locales. The first sketch has a full group, and the last sketch shows the few survivors toasting to their lost companions. The panels in-between show scenes from the adventure, including the deaths of party members, and including a scene from the final battle.
Thx!
TomB
When I read RPG material, I'm generally reading it from the perspective of how I might use it in play, rather than from the perspective of entertaining fiction.
For instance, fiction often benefits from the motivations of key characters being withheld either in whole or in part. Whereas I find this quite frustrating in RPG material. For instance, I know that Dead Gods is a well-regarded adventure, but I find it uninteresting as fiction, and bascially unplayable as a module.
I have not read a great many 4e adventures, but nearly all those that I have read I have used (either in whole or in part): H2, P2, E1 (the least useful of all these), Heathen in one of the first 4e Dungeon mags, and a couple of others. In each case there have been interesting situations - which in 4e is typically a combination of map, antagonist(s) and a couple of story vectors that I can incorporate into my own game.
When I refer to Worlds & Monsters, though, I'm referring to its reconceptuatisation of D&D story elements in overall terms, presenting them as part of a coherent and conflict-charage cosmology. The 4e MMs then follow through on this, presenting a range of classic (and also new) D&D creatures from within this cosmological perspective, and also realising their character as story elements in mechanical terms (to varying degrees, admittedly). And the player-side materials follow through too. Between the race and class descriptions (including the many sidebars in the various * Power books), and the power descriptions, and the paragon paths and epic destinies, many PCs come fully incoprorated into the cosmological conflict that underlies the default story of 4e.
For me, it's the closest that D&D has come to Gloranthan Runequest.
I'm not sure this is true. Choices have to be evaluated, and the presence of many different games increases what a typical player needs to know if he/she wants to be able to play in whatever games are available, or reduces the fraction of games the player will be comfortable with. I didn't invent this argument; see http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gl20/GeorgeLoewenstein/Papers_files/pdf/too_much_choice.pdf
Choices are helpful if you are not getting your needs met with what is available, which was true for you (from what you said). But I don't think we can reason from that to what the average case is without more data.
*Edited to add the "not". Oops.
(FWIW, I have no dog in this fight. I've only played 4e, because that's what we started with, and I've enjoyed it, but I don't really care whether it is/was the greatest revision/edition/whatever of D&D ever. My only interest in 5e is whether it is practical for our campaign; otherwise, it's just a product.)
pickin_grinnin
Explorer
Ultimately, for me it will get down to this: does 5e offer me anything I like that I don't already have in a system I own. If the answer is "yes," I'll buy it (after looking through it a lot at B&N). If "no," then I won't bother.
I tend to create my own adventures, settings, etc. from scratch, so it really gets down to the mechanics and rules for me. I don't really care about the primary world they establish (ex. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms).
I tend to create my own adventures, settings, etc. from scratch, so it really gets down to the mechanics and rules for me. I don't really care about the primary world they establish (ex. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms).
Balesir
Adventurer
I know this analysis is very in vogue at present, but after some consideration I am convinced it's mostly tosh.
It's quite possible that some folk feel that they have to evaluate everything on offer, but that's a false supposition. If it weren't, you would need to evaluate all the unpublished choices, too, since they are themselves choices, albeit ones requiring more effort. The fact is that you can just evaluate a random subset of what's on offer and be no worse off than if you only had a more restricted range of published games to choose from.
If I need to choose with little time expenditure, this is what I do - take a random selection and evaluate those. I would always rather have more choice than less, because eliminating part of that range is trivial, if I need it to be.
jasper
Rotten DM
If I could evaluate UNPUBLISHED choices, I would not be posting here. I would hitting Vegas betting with the knowledge on the UNPUBLISHED choices. Then buying a mansion and a yacht! I find your post totally silly.
Desdichado
Hero
Are you suggesting that there aren't people out there already deciding whether or not to play D&DN based on the information that's available right now?
Balesir makes a great point. Some people, (my wife for instance) are easily paralyzed by too many options. She has the feeling that if she hasn't thoroughly evaluated every option, then how can she make an informed decision and not feel buyer's remorse for her selection? In her case, opening up a wide-open field of options is not a good thing. She fits the mold of exactly the kind of person that the study referred to above is talking about.
Me, on the other hand, I'm a much more decisive personality in general. I'm ready to leap into action and consider a decision made based on a quick and dirty executive summary of a handful of options that are immediately in front of me, and I rarely look back and question my decisions already made unless 1) it's obviously not working out and a new decision needs to be made, or 2) new information becomes available to me that I didn't know when I made the prior decision.
For personalities like mine, that study is complete nonsense. I don't feel the need to research every option available; I'm perfectly happy making a decision based on the options that are immediately in front of me only. Plus, making decisions is easy, and not based on painstaking research ahead of time. Plus, I can evaluate almost subconsciously how much I'm going to like a given option ahead of time quite easily, so I feel confident in my decisions, even without lots of research. For me, having lots of options is empowering, not paralyzing.
I'm sure that the range of human responses is a wide spectrum between those two relatively extreme positions (not that I wife and I are truly on polar opposites of this spectrum; rather than she trends one way and I trend the other).
But by and large, having more options is always better. I've never heard anyone complain before that they have too many options of shows to watch on TV and therefore are paralyzed by indecision and don't watch anything. Same thing with books to read, video games to play, or vacations to take. I don't know why role-playing games would be any different in this regard than any other form of leisure time pursuit.
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