Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Again, you're drawing a distinction between "the act of actualizing the spell is itself inherently uncertain" and "the circumstances make it less than ideal." These are not the same thing, because circumstantial aspects tend to be subject to manipulation by clever players much more than inherent risks in utilizing something can be.
"Chant for three minutes" is also fundamentally different than the modern shield spell, so you're not exactly making an incisive point here.
You're wrong, and worse, you're presenting your opinion as if it were an objective truth. It's not. You might not like what the author is saying, have issues with their tone, etc. But the issues they bring up are very real, and are shared by a lot of people, regardless of whether or not you think they're legitimate.
Again, the idea that the only criticisms of 4E are that "people didn't understand it then, and still don't know" is to say that any criticism is invalid. This is not a sound principle to argue from, as it basically says that nothing you don't like is valid.
You'll find that the idea that they're completely different editions is very much an opinion that no one else shares, especially if you then turn around and say that 4E and 4Essentials are absolutely the same edition. Claiming that 3.0 and 3.5 should be treated separately necessarily requires that 4E and 4Essentials should treated the same, meaning that 4E only lasted for two years, and is therefore the shortest-lived edition in the history of D&D. Meanwhile, 3.5 not only got a two-year extension from Paizo, but then a ten-year one in the form of PF1, more than twice the length of 4E and 4Essentials put together.
So now you're saying that you know better than Alexander and Appelcline, and that the differences between 3.0 and 3.5 are salient enough to mark them as totally separate editions, whereas 4E and 4Essentials are basically the same game with no real differences between them? Yeah, no. At this point you've made it clear that you have no good-faith basis in anything you're arguing for, presumably out of some mistaken belief that everyone else is simply badmouthing your preferred edition and so deserves no serious rebuttals. Which is, of course, nonsense, and deserves to be called out as such.
I'm going to trust the accredited historian of D&D more than I'm going to trust your "take it from me" stance here, especially since you've made it clear that you're not arguing from any sort of objective analysis (and let's just skip the bit about how "objectivity doesn't really exist, because everyone has inherent opinions about everything" shtick, shall we?). If you want to have your opinions taken seriously, it helps to start by acknowledging that they are opinions, and not trashing everyone who disagrees as being mistaken haters who don't know what they're talking about.
Which not at all legitimizes the idea that 4E and 4Essentials weren't really a difference worth noting. Again, Appelcline has a lot more credibility than you do, and you don't have to look very far to see that there was confusion caused by the release of Essentials that can't really be compared to "people didn't like some of the changes in Tasha's."
Self-awareness is dead.
Even if you go with that highly-inaccurate and biased take on things, the fact that it warranted three iterations is all the proof you need that it was more successful than 4E. Which isn't surprising, since 4E was highly divisive and was rejected by a huge segment of the market, for very good reasons, one of which was its increased rejection of verisimilitude (hey, remember the actual topic of the thread before you started trolling? Yeah, it's back!).
And yet, there's no mention of the fact that the warlord has a power actualizing someone's ability to heal themselves. With words. That aren't magical. Literally, they're using a power to let someone else spend a healing surge. Even if we leave aside the issue of trying to expand the lack of verisimilitude inherent to hit points by elevating the idea that they represented both physical injuries and the capacity to keep fighting (which was already a hard-to-swallow mixture, but previously had largely put the first interpretation front-and-center while ushering the second off into a corner), the fact that you had someone else making it so that another character could expend their own resources, and non-magical resources at that, was indeed a break from verisimilitude for a lot of people. You can't just write that off as "people only bring this up because they don't understand it." We do understand it, and it's an example of what's wrong with the entire paradigm for a lot of people.
Yeah, no kidding. Go re-read the OP and its note about "proponents of verisimilitude don't say it's uber alles" again.
This take almost comes close to being the sort of discussion we should be having here, if you weren't so interested in de4Ending your favorite edition from perceived attacks because it's being critically analyzed in a particular context. As it is, the issue of having characters gain fatigue over the course of a fight (or extended fights) is one that's worth examining, but so is the failure of modeling this around hit points, a resource that is primarily lost only when an enemy scores a successful attack against you (and this isn't undone by the "damage on a miss" mechanic that 4E introduced, especially since that didn't work on minions) and which can be "spike" regained via non-magical powers, repeatedly, at other people's usage. Don't get me started on trying to fold that in alongside also modeling actual injuries taken. It was never a good idea to mix-and-match those, and while 1E at least downplayed the idea (yes, we all know about Gary's famous essay where he describes hit points as being a mixture of vigor, stamina, luck, divine protection, etc., but he then had every method of regaining hp be focused around physical healing; the spells are named cure light wounds, etc., and you certainly aren't regaining luck or divine protection by resting in bed), 4E went in the opposite direction and played them up, expanding the areas where verisimilitude was compromised on, and that was a bridge too far for a lot of people.
You demonstrated no such thing, and your example is something I already knocked down (see above). Simply put, your excuses lack substance (which is why they're excuses and not arguments). That's because verisimilitude is and always has been a legitimate vector for immersion; that you can't see it doesn't make it not so.
And here's where your mask slips off, because you're openly admitting that you think any instance of 4E being held up as a good example of a bad example is edition warring. In fact, as has already been pointed out in this thread, there needs to be a space where its failures can be examined without de4Enders coming in and decrying the effort as mere partisanship. Hence, everything you've posted in this thread thus falls apart.
Good, good, now keep going...
And yet you steadfastly refuse to see that intermingling hit points as a system for taking wounds with what should be a separate system for modeling fatigue is a bad idea. WotC should have known better, as by that point they'd not only put a wound/vitality model forward in their d20 Star Wars game, but had even showed how it could be used in D&D in the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana. Trying to say "no, it does work!" doesn't make it so.
You neglected a large number of issues, which I'll go ahead and reiterate here (not necessarily in order of importance):
- It widened areas where verisimilitude had been rolled back as a consensus for playability (hit points being the big one), which was unpalatable to people for whom the old compromise was good enough.
- Large areas of its math were broken at the beginning, which was why there needed to be errata issued for skill checks almost on the same day of the game's release, and the monster math had to be fixed later on in the life-cycle.
- It was designed by committees that had wildly different goals, as has been noted elsewhere.
- Management wanted the game to function as a World of Warcraft analogue to try and draw in some of that crowd of gamers.
- Part of the design team wanted to make a tactical skirmish game that had more of a reliance on miniatures (increasing their necessity for play, hence the use of markers, etc.).
- Another part of the team was trying to push back on all of those changes, and objected to a lot of what was going on (e.g. Radney-McFarland and the issue with magic missiles now being able to miss).
- It completely spurned the third-party community with the GSL and its "poison pill" clause, which nobody liked, and by the time that clause was removed the ship on wider support had already sailed.
- Numerous unnecessary changes to things like lore, which gamers were attached to, the initial removal of the gnome as a PC race (which, contrary to popular opinion, had fans), deliberately holding back popular monsters for later monster books in order to ensure more sales, etc. Don't even get me started on the DDI.
My issue is that you are deliberately misrepresenting the issues being talked about with how 4E walked back on the extent to which verisimilitude was present in D&D, and treating that as an attack (which it's not), or a mistake of perception (which I've already proven it isn't), and are generally being unpleasant in doing so. In other words, quite threadcrapping.
That would require that your own examples hold any weight in the first place, but I've already shown why they don't.
Except I've already shown how you're not only wrong, but wrong in a manner that's self-evidently so, to the point where it's demonstrated by your bad-faith takes on what should be obvious examples. Calling that threadcrapping is simply calling it like it is.
Being argumentative and rude is not "engaging," which is one of the reasons it's so hard to take what you're saying seriously. At no point have I ever said that my points are "word of god," and yet you go out of your way to mischaracterize them as that, and then when I point out that this is unhelpful and disruptive, you turn around and claim that it's wrong to characterize you that way. Does that make it clear why it's hard to take your posts seriously at this point?
And yet people also have other reasons for liking verisimilitude, which is what this thread was about: articulating and exploring those reasons. Yet when a single instance of saying "and here's an instance of that preference being eschewed, and how people reacted to it," you're coming in to say that their preferences are wrong, or aren't worthy of respect, or that the verisimilitude was never there (or always there and was never reduced), etc. None of which engages with the discussion, but simply tries to scuttle it.
It would have been a completely different argument. Literally, you're saying that it's not about verisimilitude at all, but something else completely, i.e. simple nostalgia and resistance to change. That's not verisimilitude, and never has been. If you can't understand that, that's on you, but don't ruin the thread for everyone else.
Interesting how you can't seem to articulate what the soft-cap on spell acquisition (beyond fifth-level spells) actually is.
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