Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Futurity" data-source="post: 7614674" data-attributes="member: 10738">You're telling me this but you aren't substantiating it. For example: you assume a more balanced mechanical implementation meant the game was better at catering to all styles and ranges of play, but I don't think what you mean when you type that is what I mean when I consider the narrow range of play styles 4E worked with.  It also didn't make it possible to narrate a coherent story with applied risk and reward that felt thematic and appropriate to the fantasy genre. What it did do well was dungeons, filled with dragons, and the extremely archetypal type of D&D that WotC had honed in on, lightning-rod style.I feel like maybe you were a player a lot more than a DM? I was a DM only, and my handful of player experiences were some of the worst, most narratively shallow gaming experiences I'd ever been subjected to.Ironic, then, that it is more friendly to my style of gaming. Maybe, just maybe 4E wasn't really as universal as you suggest? Note that I am not suggesting 5E is any more universal....it also has its limits.I've never been involved in or care about organized play but it seems like every edition of D&D handles this reasonably well.I've played D&D (and dozens of other RPGs) for 38 years now and I am only sort of sure I know what you are talking about above. But it suggests to me you've never played D&D with a strong narrative TotM focus before.Try modelling a real disease with it, then. Or a fantasy disease with effects longer than a long rest or two. You could do that in 3rd and earlier without breaking the system or causing a clash in rules, with players feeling like you were rigging the system against them. Note that 5E brings some teeth back to this, but then cleverly (?) makes most saves easy to make, so the players feel like they narrowly avoid high threat consequences, while still keeping the consequences present, if less likely.Poison as a damage type is fine, and probably one of the better simplifications that made sense. However poison in the real world (and fantasy fiction, film, and practically anywhere except D&D) remains more interesting and serious with lots of risk and narrative potential for the threat. None of that appears in any significant way in 4E, which was obsessed with designing around the idea of immediate consequences in combat and limiting the book keeping because it assumed a larger player base would appear that was just gunshy of keeping track of too many things (and then still failed in that respect).Condescension of implying I'm somehow unable to adapt to the / unfamiliar / aside, I really don't think you have played in a narrative style with an effort toward a cohesive descriptive process in which combat is meant to be visual and interesting from the story side, with the mechanics hidden in the background. 4E works fine if you do not care about any sense that you are doing other than playing a game (as opposed to telling a collaborative story). Healing surges were a fundamental game changer to how damage worked and how you thought about PC health. It was a key "give" in the long standing question of "how much of a PC's hit points are just fatigue/stress?" and the answer was: literally all of it, right up until you hit zero HP and have no more healing surges left.Healing surges weren't an /unfamiliar/ act of make believe. They were the antithesis of of good story telling at the expense of gamifying D&D so they could create mechanics experimenting with "player rewards" designed to keep players in the game under the illusion of skill.  I think the way you play(ed) D&D and the way I have played it over the decades veered off significantly along the way. I could run some good games in 4E, but it did not support the way I had run D&D previously to that point. There were major implementations in the game which significantly impacted my ability to use the game in the same manner I had in prior decades. Were these changes bad? Not necessarily, but they created a different feel,a different beat to the game if you will that it turned out I no longer enjoyed...but even I hung on longer than my players did. I abandoned 4E when I finally gave in to the reality that it was no longer fun, not in the way we all cared about. Was it a great game for intense dungeon crawls and battles? Absolutely. Could it do literally anything else with minimal or no effort like all prior editions? Nope.EDIT: super important! I am not actually trying to discredit your perceptions, claims or experiences with 4E, even though I am doing exactly that. I am instead trying to frame context around my own experiences with the game in various editions to maybe help illustrate how you and I could both have had very different and not particularly complimentary experiences. To you, you see a guy (me) who is having trouble with the /unfamiliar/ and not adapting well. To me, I see a guy who understood this quite well, and realized that the game had changed, and left a very large chunk of what I liked about it on the cutting room floor. You're view is not wrong, but neither is mine....and this is why 4E failed.</blockquote>

Verification