The Nature of Change (or, Understanding Edition Wars)

[DaveMage]

All of the races in the back of the 4e MM are playable which adds another dozen or so, including Gnomes.

I'll take your word for it on the gnomes, but I thought more was needed to make them a playable race than what was in the 4E MM.

Oh, the 3.5 MM has 46 playable races.

 

[diaglo]

But the question I have to ask is, were they really still on WoTC's train (or planning to stay on much longer?)

i was on the train. i was probably in one of the lead cabins. although, i was not a fan of d02 i held out hope that WotC was producing a product i could convert to my preferred game. or even more hopefully they would start producing product for my game too.

they kicked me off the train when they started cutting loose the stuff i liked from 3pp which was tied to them still.
and even told me in a post they were glad to see me go.

i bought 2 new cars and paid off my mortgage since i stopped buying from WotC.

diaglo "i never joke about D&D" Ooi

 

[Scribble]

they kicked me off the train when they started cutting loose the stuff i liked from 3pp which was tied to them still.
and even told me in a post they were glad to see me go.

What stuff? (out of curiousity)

 

[ExploderWizard]

I can't look at any edition of D&D and honestly say that it looks nothing like WoW.



Since WoW is, itself, based on at least some of the principles that have always powered D&D (and fantasy roleplay more generally), it would be nigh impossible for any game that felt at all like D&D not to have at least a few things in common with WoW.

But, assuming you're specifically talking about elements in WoW that didn't show up somewhere else first, I don't really know. Not having played WoW, I'm not really sure what (if anything) it does that's really original.

Having never played WOW means than you have no chance at noticing any similarities at all.

I understand what Korgoth is talking about very well. I play WOW (80 troll shammie FTW) and I am currently playing in a 4E campaign. Some of the things I have noticed, to be fair were in 3E as well so its not just a 4E = WOW generalization. Here are some specific MMOisms that affect flavor:

Magic items: Starting with 3E magic items were changed from an art to a science. No longer were items mysterious and rare, they were to be cranked out and sold like any other commodity. All you needed (per RAW) was raw materials, time, gold, and xp and presto-a magic item.
WOW (and possibly some other MMO's) work on a similar principle. The player gets the materials, and gold (no xp cost in WOW) and crafts the item. No chance of failure, no mystery, its strictly business.
4E continued this and dispensed with any remaining mystery by listing items as actual gear in the PHB. Another 4E addition to the magic item situation is the ability to disenchant unwanted magic items into residum.
This is a direct WOW import as items in WOW are routinely disenchanted into materials that fuel item enchantments.

Aggro mechanics: There have been tank, glass cannon "striker" , and healbot archetypes long before any MMO. The computer games simply used the archetypes that were already in use on the tabletop. Not having a live DM meant giving the AI mobs a reason to attack the toughest target even if that would be a far from intelligent choice. It allowed players to use teamwork to "tank and spank" a monster. This is a game mechanic that is not needed for a tabletop game. This goes back to the oldest rules of game design: The rules serve the game and not the other way around. Aggro based mechanics are good example of a game serving the rules. The rules say something works despite any logic or reason so either the game changes or the world simply obeys the rule without question.

Retraining: 3E had this before 4E and its a common occurence in WOW. Some WOW players "respec" or retrain daily depending on if they are grouping or playing solo. This has the benefit of letting players tinker with different bits of the rules but the constant overwriting of skills and abilities makes a chartacter feel more like an avatar or toon than a part of an ongoing living fantasy world. The concept of "bad" decisions being judged so because they were not optimized for job X even though the player had fun with that choice is one that seems more at home in tabletop battle games than in a roleplaying game.

There are major flavor changes that align 4E (and parts of 3E) with MMO style games. The largest overall flavor change that may be causing the most resistance is that of genre tone.

4E is not an MMO of course. It is a superhero tabletop roleplaying game wherein the protagonists dress in robes and armor rather than capes and tights. The move from swords and sorcery to supers is I think, the cause of a great deal of the resistance. It would be like taking the marvel supers RPG and turning the heroes into fighters, mages, clerics, and rogues in feel, and leaving them in the trappings of capes and spandex.

 

[The Little Raven]

I'm not sure I completely agree that the change to 3E was radical.

The system consistency changes, like a bagillion different rolls for different things (1d10 for initiative, 1d6 for surprise, d% for thief skills, etc.) being rolled into a core resolution mechanic (d20) paired with mathematical consistency ("higher is better" as opposed to "higher is better except when lower is better"), are the biggest change ever made to D&D's system since AD&D was created. That's a change to something like 75% or more of the math used in the game.

Then we have the removal of racial restrictions (suddenly, after three decades of fiction and game rules stating otherwise, elves can have paladins), the standardization of experience (no more charts for every class), damage reduction ("impossible to hurt" becomes "harder to hurt"), spells (full-time casters all get 9th-level spells, not just wizards), the scale of ability scores with the removal of caps (which merited +2 bonuses/-2 penalties, a 100% increase over previous editions), the massive change to the multiclass system (from 2e's two separate versions, multi- and dual-)... there's tons of stuff (like Monte Cook's "Ivory Tower Game Design" journal entry) that show that, objectively, 3e was a radical departure in game design from 2e and earlier (and you are correct in that much of it was just bringing in ideas that other games had innovated years before, which could be why they seem less radical to you: familiarity from other games).

The difference, as I see it, is that you like the changes from 2e to 3e more than you like the changes from 3e to 4e, which makes the 3e-4e changes seem far more radical.

 

[Scribble]

Exploder:

I think a lot of this is because videogames and MMOs have progressed to the point where they're not just stealing from TTRPGs, and are instead adding new elements to games. Design elements and thoughts that can/should be applied in other games as well.

 

[diaglo]

What stuff? (out of curiousity)

Sovereign Press -- Dragonlance
Paizo -- Dungeon and Dragon Magazine
KenzerCo -- Kalamar
White Wolf -- Ravenloft
L5R -- Rokugan aka Oriental adventures


edit: Midnight Syndicate
Code Monkey
Jinx.com

 

[Scribble]

Sovereign Press -- Dragonlance
Paizo -- Dungeon and Dragon Magazine
KenzerCo -- Kalamar
White Wolf -- Ravenloft
L5R -- Rokugan aka Oriental adventures

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but I'm not sure I see these as putting you on their train so much...

I mean I own a scion (Toyota) but I don't really deal with Toyota at all. Anytime I need service I go to a local mechanic I know and trust. Any upgrades I've added to the car I've gotten from 3rd party companies, and I don't even get my oil changed using official toyota air filters and what not... So am I really a toyota customer?

So even if you play 3e, but you're buying all your gaming stuff from some other company, are you really on the WoTC train? Or did you just hop on briefly to get to another railway?

Maybe the caturtle express?

 

[Spatula]

I'm not sure I completely agree that the change to 3E was radical. Yes, there were obvious structural changes, like AC becoming a positive number, thief abilities becoming skills, making classes progress at the same rate, and transforming weapon and non-weapon proficiencies into skills and feats.

Character classes are completely different. Multiclassing is completely different, and that was one of the big flamewar topics back in 2000, IIRC. Saving throws - no relation to what came before. Monsters are completely different. The nature of the game itself changed to focus on stacking up buffs and ambushing un-buffed foes. Characters were assumed to be carrying the wealth of a not-so-small nation on them in magic items, which was another big flamewar topic.

You say the balance between new & old works because you don't particularly care about the areas where 3e departed from the past. But it was a big change, mechanically to be sure but also stylistically. A lot of people had problems with 3e's emphasis on high fantasy - if you played D&D where +1 swords are rare & precious and the characters are not super-heroes, then you probably think that 3e abandoned D&D's core identity. You're (I'm guessing) fine with the high fantasy elements but still want some simulationist trappings. But people who never played D&D as a simulationist game have no issues with 4e de-emphasizing that style of gameplay; it's not D&D's core identity to them.

I will say that 3e was rather conservative when it came to trying to capture the "feel" of previous editions, despite being an almost completely different game. Whereas 4e has basically done a DC-style Crisis event where you see a lot of the familiar elements but they're scrambled and different. That has little to do with the mechanics of 4e, though, and much to do with the radical setting changes.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Exploder:

I think a lot of this is because videogames and MMOs have progressed to the point where they're not just stealing from TTRPGs, and are instead adding new elements to games. Design elements and thoughts that can/should be applied in other games as well.

I agree that MMO's are certainly adding elements and lot of them are great elements.............for an MMO. Elements that serve a computer game very well need to be considered very carefully before being applied to a tabletop game, thats all. I play computer and tabletop games and enjoy both for very different reasons. When differences begin to blur and move closer to similarities then its time to step away and re-evaluate things.